The Historical Jesus

by John Dominic Crossan

Second, the four intracanonical ones represent neither a total collection nor a random sampling of all those available but were deliberately selected by a process in which others were rejected for reasons not only of content but even of form.

Fourth, differences and discrepancies between accounts and versions are not due primarily to vagaries of memory or divergences in emphasis but to quite deliberate theological interpretations of Jesus.

Finally, and in summary, the continuing presence of the risen Jesus and the abiding experience of the Spirit gave the transmitters of the Jesus tradition a creative freedom we would never have dared postulate were it not forced upon us by the evidence.

Honor and shame, then, could be defined as the ideology of small, discrete, and unstable groups competing permanently for basic resources that are attained insecurely and maintained precariously but where conflict must be reluctantly transposed into cooperation for the most precious resource of all, marriageable women.

The village of Nazareth, then, at an elevation of over a thousand feet and with its single ancient spring, is exactly what the terrain dictated. But that, of course, isolated the village off the beaten track.

Nazareth, clearly a village, is closest, not to one of those towns, but, at three or four miles distance, to Sepphoris, a smaller city.

In 4 B.C.E., during the revolts after Herod the Great’s death, Sepphoris was apparently the rebel center in Lower Galilee. Its royal arsenals were taken by Judas, son of Ezekias, and, in retaliation, Quinctilius Varus, proconsul of Syria, had the city destroyed and its inhabitants sold into slavery

When Josephus, in the defensive history of his Galilean leadership, speaks of Sepphoris as “situated in the heart of Galilee, surrounded by numerous villages” (Life 346), Nazareth is among those unnamed villages, which must be seen not as isolated entities but as satellites of a provincial capital “of considerable importance in late antiquity”

Two roads, therefore, and possibly carrying quite different types of influence, converged in Sepphoris so that the village or hamlet of Nazareth, while certainly off the beaten track, was not very far off a fairly well beaten track. To understand Nazareth, therefore, demands consideration not only of its rural aspects but also of its relationship to an urban provincial capital that contained, in the summary statement of Andrew Overman, “courts, a fortress, a theater seating 3–4000, a palace, a colonnaded street on top of the acropolis, two city walls, two markets (upper and lower), archives, the royal bank, and the arsenal… [and a] population … around 30,000” (164).

In the words of Eric Meyers, “the isolation that often is associated with the Galilean personality is… quite inappropriate when we speak of Jesus of Nazareth, who is growing up along one of the busiest trade routes of ancient Palestine at the very administrative center of the Roman provincial government”

Cumulatively, therefore, with six obols to the drachma, Tryphon’s four taxes for 23 to 24 C.E. came to sixty drachmae. On Naphtali Lewis’s price index of goods and services in first-century Egypt, that is the equivalent, for example, of the wages for about twenty days of legionary service or forty days of household industrial labor (208).

the governing classes of agrarian societies probably received at least a quarter of the national income of most agrarian states, and that the governing class and ruler together usually received not less than half”

I presume, therefore, that Jewish magic and miracle working were widespread on the popular and oral levels among the lower classes and that the few detailed cases we know indicate only those most famous figures whose appropriation and absorption was deemed necessary for rabbinical ascendancy.

First, as Richard Horsley emphasized, that double “at Sepphoris” is literally “in Sepphoris” the first time and “around Sepphoris” the second time (1988:192). If one had only the former phrase, Judas might be considered an urban rebel striking out from a base in Sepphoris. But the latter’s Greek makes it much clearer that he gathered his forces “around” Sepphoris, then attacked its royal arsenal, and thereafter returned to the countryside whence he had come.

Two major conclusions are indicated from all of that. One is that this whole stream of tradition, far from starting on the lips of Jesus, began only after his crucifixion with meditation on Zechariah 12:10, then moved on to combine Daniel 7:13 with that prophecy, and finally left only the barest vestige of those beginnings in the perdurance of the see verb for the apocalyptic judge. Another is that, despite a common background in Daniel 7:13, some early traditions felt no need to speak in a titular way of Jesus as Son of Man even if others did. So, on the one hand, Paul and Didache 16 presume Daniel 7:13 but think of Jesus as the returning Lord. Revelation 1:13 and 14:14 presume Daniel 7:13 but think of Jesus as the “one like a son of man” there mentioned. On the other, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Sayings Gospel Q, and Mark all see Jesus as the titular Son of Man. Such an early bifurcation is hard to explain if it was Jesus who first spoke of himself as titular Son of Man based on Daniel 7:13.

Combining Edwards and Schmidt but using my own terminology, I conclude that the Sayings Gospel Q adapted that prophetic correlative into an apocalyptic correlative in order to imagine and develop content for the advent of Jesus as the avenging Son of Man. “As” this or that happened in general nature or biblical past, “so” would a corresponding this or that happen when the Son of Man returned. Once again, although the Sign of Jonah is older than either the Sayings Gospel Q or Mark, its Son of Man interpretation came in only from that former Gospel’s own apocalyptic layer.

Bui what is extraordinary is that I could not find a single case within those six complexes in which two independent sources both contained the Son of Man designation for Jesus.

It is that “anyone” that negates the very social function of table, namely, to establish a social ranking by what one eats, how one eats, and with whom one eats. It is the random and open commensality of the parable’s meal that is its most startling element. One could, in such a situation, have classes, sexes, ranks, and grades all mixed up together. The social challenge of such egalitarian commensality is the radical threat of the parable’s vision. It is only a story, of course, but it is one that focuses its egalitarian challenge on society’s mesocosmic mirror, the table as the place where bodies meet to eat. And the almost predictable counteraccusation to such open commensality is immediate: Jesus is a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of tax collectors and sinners. He makes, in other words, no appropriate distinctions and discriminations. He has no honor. He has no shame.

Aristophanes might create a goddess known as Poverty, the divine personification of the deserving and hard-working poor, and so quite appropriately opposed to the leisured laziness of the idle rich, but he created no goddess known as Beggary, gave no apotheosis to Destitution. That is, however, exactly what Jesus did.

“It is hard,” as Douglas Oakman rightly concludes, “to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the rule of God to a weed.” And he is also surely correct that a peasant audience hearing Jesus speak of birds attracted by the mustard plant would think immediately, as in 34 The Sower [1/3] parable, “that birds are natural enemies of the sown” (1986:127). The point, in other words, is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties. Something you would want in only small and carefully controlled doses—if you could control it.

With mustard and darnel, then, stands another and triply shocking image for the Kingdom: a woman hiding leaven in her dough. It’s there, it’s natural, it’s normal, it’s necessary, but society has a problem with it.

He now has, as it were, something priceless and also useless. And, that is a rather challenging image of the Kingdom.

What is needed, then, is not insight into the Kingdom as future but a recognition of the Kingdom as present. For Jesus, a Kingdom of beggars and weeds is a Kingdom of here and now.

Furthermore, while we have as high as sixfold independent attestation in the primary stratum of the sayings, we never get higher than twofold for that of the miracles.

There is, in summary, only one very plausible collection of miracles evident in our sources, and that is the common source that lies behind Mark and John and is most clearly evident in that fivefold sequential set. No doubt there may have been other such sets as well. But we still need much more evidence to postulate a Gospel of miracles similar to the already established Gospels of sayings. Maybe, of course, it was there very early and erased very fast?

An individual is, of course, being cured, but the symbolism is also hard to miss or ignore. The demon is both one and many; is named Legion, that fact and sign of Roman power; is consigned to swine; and is cast into the sea. A brief performancial summary, in other words, of every Jewish revolutionary’s dream! And it may be left open whether the exorcist is asked to depart because a cured demoniac is not worth a herd of swine or because the people see quite clearly the political implications of the action.

One is the almost schizoid position of a colonial people. If they submit gladly to colonialism, they conspire in their own destruction. If they hate and despise it, they admit that something more powerful than themselves, and therefore to some extent desirable, is hateful and despicable. And what does that do to them? Another is that colonial exorcisms are at once less and more than revolution; they are, in fact, individuated symbolic revolution.

Here, I think, is the heart of the original Jesus movement, a shared egalitarianism of spiritual and material resources. I emphasize this as strongly as possible, and I insist that its materiality and spirituality, its facticity and symbolism cannot be separated. The mission we are talking about is not, like Paul’s, a dramatic thrust along major trade routes to urban centers hundreds of miles apart. Yet it concerns the longest journey in the Greco-Roman world, maybe in any world, the step across the threshold of a peasant stranger’s home.

In Mark, as everyone knows, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem only once, at the end. In John, on the other hand, he seems to be up there almost every chapter. I think, however, that the units of the Signs Gospel at the base of our present John often concentrated on Jerusalem as the place of opposition and consummation, so that many units happened, as it were, “in Jerusalem.” It was only when the entire unity was read as a sequential narrative composition that Galilean, or Samaritan, or Judean locations had to be correlated, so that one is now left with an overall impression that Jesus was constantly going to and from Jerusalem. None of that, however, proves that Mark’s single ascent is any less artificial and compositional.

In summary, therefore, I think the symbolic destruction was but the logical extension of the miracle and table conjunction, of open healing and open eating; I think that it actually happened and, if it happened at Passover, could easily have led to arrest and execution.

Such a background means that a two-part sequence of eating and drinking, of breaking bread and then pouring a libation before drinking wine, or more simply, of bread and wine, summarizes and symbolizes the entire process of a Greco-Roman formal meal.

As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, but was brought together and became one, so let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom, for thine is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.

I have spent time and space on Didache 9–10 to emphasize two points. First, the older prayer in Didache 10 indicates a eucharistie meal with no ritualization of bread and wine/cup, let alone anything else. The newer prayer in Didache 9 does have a ritualization of cup and bread, but, even late in the first century C.E., at least some (southern?) Syrian Christians could celebrate a Eucharist of bread and wine with absolutely no hint of Passover meal, Last Supper, or passion symbolism built into its origins or development. I cannot believe that they knew all about those elements and studiously avoided them. I can only presume that they were not there for everyone from the beginning, that is, from solemn, formal, and final institution by Jesus himself. Already, of course, Didache 9–10 represents a ritualization of the open commensality of Jesus and his first followers. There is nothing necessarily wrong with such a development, but, especially as one follows that worthiness warning from Didache 10:6b into 9:5, it is hard not to acknowledge a loss: the holy ones are now at table, and the dogs are not to be fed.

It is simply that their dual existence renders most unlikely a Last Supper with its passion symbolism institutionalized and commanded to repetition by Jesus himself on the eve of his death.

We have now moved from, first, open commensality during the lifetime of Jesus through, second, general eucharistie meal without and then with a bread and wine(cup) emphasis and on, third, to specific passion remembrance, celebration, and participation. And this later specification is given as Jesus’ direct and explicit institution on, appropriately, the eve of his death.

“Mark has,” according to Klosinski, “organized three of the boat trips of Jesus and his disciples (4:35–41; 6:45–52; and 8:13–21), three healings (7:31–37; 8:22–26; and 10:46–52), and the two feeding miracles and the last supper (6:3–44; 8:1–10; 14:17–26) into progressive, triadic structures. A feature of this structure is that the final member serves as a climax of the previous two” (207–208). On the narrower sequential level, Mark 14:22–25 is brutally linked, externally, to the preceding prophecy of Judas’ betrayal by a triple repetition: “they were at table eating … one who is eating with me … one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the dish with me.” And, internally, Mark insists at 14:23 that “they all drank of it,” as if to associate all the disciples with the betrayer himself. Following those clues, and reading Mark 14:21–25 in the context of Mark’s compositional, polemical, and climactic theology, I conclude that Mark is opposing an institutionalized eucharistie ritual that does not allow for Jews and Gentiles at the same table (Kelber 45–65) and that emphasizes the presence of Jesus now rather than the coming of Jesus soon within that liturgy. We have come, as it were, full circle. “Mark is caught,” as Klosinski summarizes his doctoral dissertation, “between two understandings of Christian commensality. One understanding envisions commensality as a continuation of the type of table-fellowship remembered from the time of Jesus. Another understands commensa...

And he concluded that, “while the collections of testimonia that are found in patristic writers might be regarded as the result of early Christian catechetical and missionary activity, 4Q Testimonia shows that the stringing together of OT texts from various books was a pre-Christian literary procedure, which may well have been imitated in the early stage of the formation of the NT. It resembles so strongly the composite citations of the NT writers that it is difficult not to admit that testimonia influenced certain parts of the NT” (1957:531, 534).

Prophecy and history could begin to interweave, mutually influencing and even creating each other. Obviously, of course, all such activity demands a most sophisticated scribal and exegetical capability. But the referent of that capacity could be, for some, the Teacher of Righteousness and his Qumran Essenes and, for others, Jesus of Nazareth and his Galilean followers.

All such precise search and verbatim application presume not only developed literacy but also exegetical dexterity. A retainer-class believer is now interpreting the peasant-class Jesus.

That seems a brilliant explatation of why Jesus of Nazareth was born at Bethlehem, unless, of course, one knows anything of Roman history and Roman, or indeed any, bureaucracy (Schürer-Vermes 1.399–427). First, there never was a worldwide census under Augustus. Second, the Palestinian census was undertaken by the Syrian legate, P. Sulpicius Quirinius, in 6 to 7 C.E., about a decade after the birth of Jesus. You will recall, from chapter 6 above, that its occasion was the annexation of Archelaus’ territories under a direct Roman prefecture. Third, and above all, even if Augustus had ordained a complete census of the Roman world, and even if Quirinius had overseen its administration in Archelaus’ territories, the Roman custom was to count you in the place of your domicile or work and not in that of your ancestry or birth.

We shall see exactly the same process below when the Cross Gospel attempts to write, from prophetic allusions, a first “historical narrative” about the passion of Jesus. Hide the prophecy, tell the narrative, and invent the history.

What follows now depends on my earlier and much more complete study on the origins of the passion and resurrection narratives (1988a). I proposed that, first of all, Jesus’ closest followers knew nothing more about the passion than the fact of the crucifixion, that they had fled and later had no available witnesses for its details, and that they were concerned, in any case, with far more serious matters, such as whether that death negated all that Jesus had said and done, all that they had accepted and believed. Second, what followed in one very literate and highly sophisticated stream of tradition was an intense search of the Scriptures, similar to that at Qumran. It discovered verses and images each of which could be applied to the passion as a whole but not, of course, to its individual details, for no such details existed in their memories. Third, those individual scriptural connections and specific prophetic fulfillments could be organized into a coherent and sequential story. But, for this, some overarching form, shape, pattern, or genre had to be conceived or adopted. Finally, once such a narrative had been achieved, its historicity could be improved by more accurate verisimilitude and refined by more precise detail. The process developed, in other words, over these primary steps. First, the historical passion, composed of minimal knowledge, was known only in the general terms recorded by, say, Josephus or Tacitus. Next, the prophetic passion, composed of multiple a...

In what follows, to the contrary, I propose to show how Jesus as a crown among thorns became Jesus crowned with thorns and how Jesus as Rejected Scapegoat became Jesus as Mocked King.

But, on the other hand, every line of that description is redolent with prophetic allusions and with ones whose presence can be vindicated from direct and explicit quotations elsewhere in early Christian literature. Besides a possible one from Psalm 118:13 in A, a more secure one from Isaiah 58:2 in C, and a definite one from Isaiah 50:6–7 (spitting, buffeting/striking, nudging/piercing) in A’, all those seen above from Zechariah 3:1–5 and 12:10 (robing, crowning, piercing) are also present. And even the scapegoat background is still evident in that phrase “nudged him with a reed,” a qualification not present in Barnabas 7.

It was not, I emphasize, that each prophecy was applied to specific details of the passion, for no such specific details yet existed. Those individual prophetic passages were also organized around typological applications that allowed for extended meditative exegesis. Read, for example, the correlation between the sacrifice of the red heifer and the death of Jesus in Barnabas 8, with its assertion, in 8:2, that “the calf is Jesus.” But those exegeses still emphasized only the passion. Next, then, dyadic structures organized and developed the isolated prophecies toward a balanced emphasis on passion and parousia, for example, in Zechariah 12:10–14, 3:1–5, or the Day of Atonement’s detailed ritual for the two goats. That was, of course, a tremendously important achievement involving a complete trajectory from past, through present, into future. I insist, once again, that those processes were initially not just apologetic and polemical but constitutive and foundational. Finally, historicized narratives were created out of those prophetic complexes, stories so good that their prophetic origins were almost totally obliterated. I consider it quite possible that a unit such as Gospel of Peter 3:6–9 may have arisen even before the larger complex of which it is now a part. The reason is the prior existence of the Carabas case, or at least the model behind it, and also the polished chiastic and titular construction of that particular unit. In any case, once the abusing of Jesus was ...

But the Passover amnesty is a magnificent solution, since, for Mark, it symbolically sums up the events of the preceding decades. The people were asked to choose between a bandit or Jesus. They chose the bandit. They chose the leadership of the violent revolutionary over the pacific Jesus, and thereby, for Mark, came the war of 66 C.E. against Rome. The Barabbas incident is true as process even if it never actually happened as event.

He created and sent to Pilate, in 15:43, one “Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God.” That is a perfect in-between figure, at once within the Jewish leadership elite as “respected” and still connected to Jesus as “looking.” Need I say that Mark’s naming him renders him more not less suspect as an historical figure in my eyes? Both Luke and Matthew are, however, a little nervous with that creation, especially with how Joseph can have a solid and powerful foot in both camps, can be, as it were, at once “Jewish authority” and “Christian believer.” Matthew 27:57 solves the ambiguity by stressing Joseph’s Christian rather than his Jewish credentials: “When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus.” Luke 23:50–51 focuses on the other half and explains his Jewish rather than his Christian credentials: “Now there was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their purpose and deed, and he was looking for the kingdom of God.” John 19:38 solves the problem in his own way by speaking of “Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews.” But then, in 19:39, he adds “Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds’ weight.” Jesus, now, is regally embalmed,...

But all of those industrious redactions set out to solve one simple problem. Nobody knew what had happened to Jesus’ body

If all those accounts derived from composite memory and historical recall, it is quite remarkable that an almost hour-by-hour remembrance prevailed for the death and burial of Jesus but an almost total discrepancy prevailed for what was, I would presume, even more important, namely, the extraordinary return of Jesus from beyond the grave to give the disciples their missionary mandate and apostolic commission.

I propose a single stream of tradition for the passion-resurrection traditions from the Cross Gospel into Mark, from both of them into both Matthew and Luke, and from all of them into John.