The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately Following After the Execution of Jesus

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 6, 1998 by Patrick Marrin

THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY: DISCOVERING WHAT HAPPENED IN THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EXECUTION OF JESUS

By John Dominic Crossan

HarperCollins, 653 pages, $30

If the forces that drive modern publishing -- untold stories and shocking mysteries offered to public curiosity in exchange for money -- have any place on which to converge, it might as well be on Jesus, the ultimate celebrity. Books about the search for the historical Jesus, the real Jesus, the uncensored, unconventional and unknown Jesus, now inhabit not a shelf but whole sections in most bookstores, with part of every big outlet given over to religion, New Age, the occult and self-help titles flowing seamlessly into each other.

The current boom is a publicist's dream, but it also reflects and is likely to be driving some serious research and writing as well. Alongside a broad and spasmodic interest in spirituality, a growing audience of perceptive, well-educated readers wants serious and challenging books about religion.

Think of research about the historical Jesus as a large jigsaw puzzle with most of its completed portions spread out in a kind of rough ring around piles of loose pieces still being assembled around an empty center.

The empty center

The empty center of the puzzle is Jesus himself, elusive, inaccessible except through the interpretive filters of the first century Christian church. It was, of course, the suggestion that there could be a gap between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith" that was the powerful and unsettling question that first propelled all this research out of Enlightenment England and Europe into the modern and post-modern spotlight.

In 1998, as we slide into what some have called the "ultra-minimalist, post-avant-garde" stages of the quest, we might imagine the same puzzle, only five layers deep, with key pieces missing or in dispute from every layer and the center now a jagged canyon of gaps and assertions, interlocking and competing hypotheses.

Charlotte Allen's The Human Jesus provides a helpful overview of historical Jesus books before, including and since Albert Schweitzer's classic 1906 survey of over 200 German academics who had weighed in, often ponderously, on the subject, beginning with Herman Samuel Reimarus' daring Fragments, published between 1774 and 1778. Allen's attempt at grouping the research by country -- England, France, Germany and so on -- by ideological movement -- Reformation, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modern, Post-Modern and so on -- or by scholar -- Kantian, Hegelian, Bultmannian and so on -- reveals the density and complexity of the whole enterprise. A pullout color-coded chronology showing who was writing when, influencing whom, would have helped this reader.

Some general observations are in order. Allen's survey shows that Jesus was by no means just a theological subject. Defining just who Jesus was, and is, was the red thread running through mainstream philosophical, scientific and literary thought for centuries, engaging every major thinker from Sir Isaac Newton to Friedrich Hegel. Allen also tracks Jesus research along some important trajectories, showing how it blooms into the popular biblical fiction genre through authors like David Friedrich Strauss, Ernest Renan, Gustave Flaubert and Oscar Wilde, whose sensational, eroticized Bible stories were the shallow but immensely popular forerunners of the Hollywood epic.

Allen's book is almost too entertaining in places, and we sense the intrusion of the publicist in a survey that might have been clearer and shorter without the gossip. It is important to know that Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot, translated Strauss' book into English but distracting to learn that she probably had an affair with eugenics-obsessed economist Herbert Spencer, who might have married her had she been better looking.

An important lesson from Allen's labor is just how much power the cataloger has in determining who is mainstream and who is marginal. In covering current research, Allen sides with more traditional Catholic writers and with those who are recovering Jesus' Jewishness as effecting a key "return" after much misdirection. She gives short shrift, in particular, to Jesus Seminar scholars, one of whom the rest of this review will be about.

A weighty but worthwhile work for serious readers is John Dominic Crossan's latest title, The Birth of Christianity. The book continues (and defends) some controversial propositions begun in Crossan's earlier studies of Jesus, history's most famous Palestinian peasant. Crossan, a retired DePaul University professor best known as part of the deconstructionist wrecking crew called the "Jesus Seminar," needs no publicist. He has caught both criticism and public attention for some sensational speculations distilled, often by his critics, from hundreds of pages of carefully nuanced evidence, that, for example, the canonical gospel accounts of Jesus' death and burial were composed more out of prophecy fulfillment imagery than from any eye-witness accounts, that there may have been no burial at all (crucified corpses were dragged from their crosses by wild dogs or tossed into anonymous lime pits), and that the "bodily resurrection" of Jesus was originally and is now most meaningfully understood as part of the eschatological communal death and vindication of the just rather than a visible and witnessed miracle elevating Jesus individually and uniquely as savior.