The Historical Jesus

by John Dominic Crossan

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 ...