historical Jesus according to John Dominic Crossan's first strata sources: A critical comment, The

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Sep 2002 by Ingolfsland, Dennis

VII. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

This study has shown that three first strata sources either directly call Jesus the Messiah or present him in messianic terms. Three first strata sources refer to Jesus as one who brings salvation. Four first strata sources say that Jesus either thought of himself as the incarnation of God or was thought of in those terms by his followers. Three first strata sources attest to the resurrection of Jesus.

Nothing in this article should be construed as lending support to Crossan's creation of sources out of whole cloth, like the "Cross Gospel" or the "Apocalyptic Scenario" or the "miracles collection,"42 nor for his idiosyncratic use and dating of sources like Egerton 2, Oxyrhynchus 1224, etc. Nor did this paper attempt to construct a comprehensive picture of Jesus from Crossan's first strata sources.

The purpose of this article was to show that even assuming Crossan's system of stratification and the idiosyncratic dating of most of his sources, the Jesus we find in Crossan's own multiply attested first strata sources is radically different than the Jesus Crossan is proclaiming. While Crossan proclaims Jesus as a peasant Jewish Cynic who preached a message of egalitarianism and did not even think of himself as Messiah, much less as someone who was equal with God, Crossan's first strata sources actually paint a picture of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, Savior, and incarnation of God, who performed amazing miracles and rose from the dead.

1 Titles include: The Birth of Christianity; Discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998); The Essential Jesus: Original sayings and earliest images (Edison, NJ: Castle, 1998); Excavating Jesus: Beneath the stones, behind the texts (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the contours of canon (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1992); In Parables: The challenge of the Historical Jesus (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1992); Jesus: A revolutionary biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Who is Jesus? Answers to your questions about the historical Jesus (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999); Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the roots of antiSemitism in the Gospel story of the death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995); Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up: A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990).

2"The Historical Jesus in Earliest Christianity," in Jesus and Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994) 1-21; "Itinerants and Householders in the Earliest Jesus Movement," in Whose Historical Jesus? (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997) 7-24; "Itinerants and Householders in the Earliest Kingdom Movement," in Reimagining Christian Origins (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996) 113-29; "Our Own Faces in Deep Wells: A future for Historical Jesus Research," in God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999) 282-310; "Why is Historical Jesus Research Necessary?" in Jesus Two Thousand Years Later (Harrisburg PA: Trinity Press International, 2000) 7-37.