Dominic Crossan Quotes

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

If an audience kept complete silence during a challenge parable from Jesus and if an audience filed past him afterward saying, 'Lovely parable, this morning, Rabbi,' Jesus would have failed utterly.

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.

. . . I still hold two truths with equal and fundamental certainty. One: the British did terrible things to the Irish. Two: the Irish, had they the power, would have done equally terrible things to the British. And so also for any other paired adversaries I can imagine. The difficulty is to hold on to both truths with equal intensity, not let either one negate the other, and know when to emphasize one without forgetting the other. Our humanity is probably lost and gained in the necessary tension between them both. I hope, by the way, that I do not sound anti-British. It is impossible not to admire a people who gave up India and held on to Northern Ireland. That shows a truly Celtic sense of humor.

When a metaphor gets big, it is called “tradition”; when it gets bigger, it is called “reality”;

sadly, the book of Job was but a speed bump on the Deuteronomic superhighway. The delusion of divine punishments still prevails inside and outside religion over the clear evidence of human consequences, random accidents, and natural disasters. This does not simply distort theology; it defames the very character of God.

The heart of God’s justice is to make sure that the “weak and the orphan” have received their share of God’s resources for them to live and thrive. Retributive justice comes in only when that ideal is violated.

To obtain and possess the kingdoms of the world, with their power and glory, by violent injustice is to worship Satan. To obtain and possess the kingdom, the power, and the glory by nonviolent justice is to worship God.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should.

We humans are not getting more evil or sinful but are simply getting more competent and efficient at whatever we want to do--including sin as willed violence. And so, we have become, as Genesis 4 warned us inaugurally, steadily or even exponentially better and better at violence. And now, at last, that capacity threatens not just the family or the tribe, but the world and the Earth.

Still, as one ponders that progress from open commensality with Jesus to episcopal banquet with Constantine, is it unfair to regret a progress that happened so fast and moved so swiftly, that was accepted so readily and criticized so lightly? Is

And how does one know that God is just? Because God stood against the Egyptian Empire to save some doomed slaves. God does not simply prefer Jews to Egyptians. God does not simply prefer slaves to masters. The only true God prefers justice to injustice, righteousness to unrighteousness, and is therefore God the Liberator. That very ancient Jewish tradition was destined to clash profoundly and fiercely with Roman commercialization, urbanization, and monetization in the first-century Jewish homeland.

This is my working definition of history: History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. There are times we can get only alternative perspectives on the same event. (There are always alternative perspectives, even when we do not hear them.) But history as argued public reconstruction is necessary to reconstruct our past in order to project our future.

It is not even accurate to say that Christianity eventually broke away from Judaism. It is more accurate to say that, out of that matrix of biblical Judaism and that maelstrom of late Second-Temple Judaism, two great traditions eventually emerged: early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Each claimed exclusive continuity with the past, but in truth each was as great a leap and as valid a development from that common ancestry as was the other. They are not child and parent; they are two children of the same mother. So, of course, were Cain and Abel.

I need electricity to charge my computer, which is, by the way, an Apple Macintosh, which I chose initially because the Bible proclaims that “those who look through the windows see dimly” (Eccl. 12:3).

I glimpse again that biblical rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, assertion-and-subversion. As that rhythm becomes ever clearer as the very heartbeat of the biblical tradition, we will see the basic solution for How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. Read it all carefully and thoughtfully, recognize radicality’s assertion, expect normalcy’s subversion, and respect the honesty of a story that tells the truth.

The ecstatic vision and social program sought to rebuild a society upward from its grass roots but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism, with free healing brought directly to the peasant homes and free sharing of whatever they had in return. The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal, miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality, was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations, or even at the Mediterranean’s patriarchal combination of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations.

The divine origins of Jesus are, to be sure, just as fictional or mythological as those of Octavius. But to claim them for Octavius surprised nobody in that first century. What was incredible was that anyone at all claimed them for Jesus.

There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. 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.

[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities— be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart. In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God’s nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization’s violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ. Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God’s vision: “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: “Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior’” (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God’s radicality and civilization’s normalcy? That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount preferred loving enemies and praying for persecutors while Jesus the Christ of the book of Revelation preferred killing enemies and slaughtering persecutors. It is not that Jesus the Christ changed his mind, but that in standard biblical assertion-and-subversion strategy, Christianity changed its Jesus.

On the one hand, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment (that’s a metaphor, by the way) correctly “enlightened” us on the necessity of observation and experimentation in the physical sciences and the value of reason and debate, proof and repetition in science and technology. In that process, the dead hand of inquisitional power and the cold gaze of ecclesiastical control were removed from spheres about which they knew too little and claimed too much. That was a magnificent achievement and must always be appreciated as such. On the other hand, the Enlightenment also dramatically “endarkened” us on metaphor and symbol, myth and parable, especially in religion and theology. We judge, for example, that the ancients took their religious stories literally, but that we are now sophisticated enough to recognize their delusions. What, however, if those ancients intended and accepted their stories as metaphors or parables, and we are the mistaken ones? What if those pre-Enlightenment minds were quite capable of hearing a metaphor, grasping its meaning immediately and its content correctly, and never worrying about the question: Is this literal or metaphorical? Or, better, what if they knew how to take their foundational metaphors and stories programmatically, functionally, and seriously without asking too closely about literal and metaphorical distinctions? We have, in other words, great post-Enlightenment gain, but also great post-Enlightenment loss.

Two transformations are at the center of this life. For want of better language, I call them the personal and the political. The Christian life is about personal transformation into the likeness of Christ (from one degree to another, as Paul puts it); and it is about participation in God’s passion for the kingdom of God. The personal and the political are brought together in “the way of the cross”—an image of personal transformation and confrontation with the domination systems of this world.

The rebel general Calgacus describes the Roman Empire just before his fatal encounter with its military might in northeastern Scotland: Robbers of the world, now that earth fails their all-devastating hands, they probe even the sea: if their enemy have wealth, they have greed; if he be poor, they are ambitious; East nor West has glutted them; alone of mankind they covet with the same passion want [poor lands] as much as wealth [rich lands]. To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace.

Firmly grounded in the divine dream of Israel’s Torah, the Bible’s prophetic vision insists that God demands the fair and equitable sharing of God’s world among all of God’s people. In Israel’s Torah, God says, “The land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Lev. 25:23). We are all tenant farmers and resident aliens in a land and on an earth not our own. The prophets speak in continuity with that radical vision of the earth’s divine ownership. They repeatedly proclaim it with two words in poetic parallelism. “The Lord is exalted,” proclaims Isaiah. “He dwells on high; he filled Zion with justice and righteousness” (33:5). “I am the Lord,” announces Jeremiah in the name of God. “I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight” (9:24). And those qualities must flow from God to us, from heaven to earth. “Thus says the Lord,” continues Jeremiah. “Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place” (22:3). “Justice and righteousness” is how the Bible, as if in a slogan, summarizes the character and spirit of God the Creator and, therefore, the destiny and future of God’s created earth. It points to distributive justice as the Bible’s radical vision of God. “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field,” mourns the prophet Isaiah, “until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land” (5:8). But that landgrab is against the dream of God and the hope of Israel. Covenant with a God of distributive justice who owns the earth necessarily involves, the prophets insist, the exercise of distributive justice in God’s world and on God’s earth. All God’s people must receive a fair share of God’s earth.

The first and fundamental question of this book is this: How do we Christians know which is our true God— our Bible’s violent God, or our Bible’s nonviolent God? The answer is actually obvious. The norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ. Christ is the standard by which we measure everything else in the Bible. Since Christianity claims Christ as the image and revelation of God, then God is violent if Christ is violent, and God is nonviolent if Christ is nonviolent. This is even given in what we are called. We are called Christ-ians not Bible-ians, so our very name asserts the ascendancy of Christ over the Bible.

Imagine the upside-down triangle formed by the Anatolian plateau in the west, the Mesopotamian plain in the east, and the Egyptian valley in the south. Squeeze the sides of that triangle between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian desert, and there in the Levantine narrows is tiny Israel. It was the hinge of the three then-known continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was the corridor, cockpit, and cauldron of imperial competition. With warring superpowers first to the north and south, then to the west and east, invasion for Israel was inescapable and defeat inevitable—despite Deuteronomy 28. If Israel had spent all of its life on its knees praying, the only change in its history would have been to have died—on its knees praying. It is a crime against both humanity and divinity to tell a people so located that a military defeat is a punishment from God. This holds also, but for different reasons, on disease and drought, famine and even earthquake. No wonder, therefore, that Israel’s Psalter is filled with cries for forgiveness and pleas for mercy. External invasions, internal famines, and any other disasters were not divine punishments for how the people of Israel lived its covenantal life with God, but human consequences of where the nation of Israel lived it.

Now, what on earth does that mean, especially if one does not spiritualize it away, as Matthew immediately did, into “poor [or destitute] in spirit”—that is, the spiritually humble or religiously obedient? Did Jesus really think that bums and beggars were actually blessed by God, as if all the destitute were nice people and all the aristocrats correspondingly evil? Is this some sort of naive or romantic delusion about the charms of destitution? If, however, we think not just of personal or individual evil but of social, structural, or systemic injustice—that is, of precisely the imperial situation in which Jesus and his fellow peasants found themselves—then the saying becomes literally, terribly, and permanently true. In any situation of oppression, especially in those oblique, indirect, and systemic ones where injustice wears a mask of normalcy or even of necessity, the only ones who are innocent or blessed are those squeezed out deliberately as human junk from the system’s own evil operations. A contemporary equivalent: only the homeless are innocent. That is a terrifying aphorism against society because, like the aphorisms against the family, it focuses not just on personal or individual abuse of power but on such abuse in its systemic or structural possibilities—and there, in contrast to the former level, none of our hands are innocent or our consciences particularly clear.

we are not “the People of the Book.” We are “the People with the Book,” but even more importantly, we are “the People of the Person.

John Dominic Crossan wrote in the concluding chapter, “Mine Eyes Decline the Glory,” of his wonderful memoir, A Long Way From Tipperary [2000]. I’ll just read this:

John Dominic Crossan, who argues that healing and a shared meal were the two central features of Jesus’ public activity

Justice without love is brutality. Love without justice is banality.

In Paul’s lifetime Roman emperors were deemed divine, and, first and foremost, Augustus was called Son of God, God, and God of God. He was Lord, Redeemer,

Paul opposed Rome with Christ against Caesar, not because that empire was particularly unjust or oppressive, but because he questioned the normalcy of civilization itself, since civilization has always been imperial, that is, unjust and oppressive.

An earlier image in which Theoklia and Paul were equally authoritative apostolic figures has been replaced by one in which the male is apostolic and authoritative and the female is blinded and silenced.

All were absolutely equal with each other. But in 1 Timothy, a letter attributed to Paul by later Christians though not actually written by him, women are told to be silent in church and pregnant at home (2:8–15). And a later follower of Paul inserted in 1 Corinthians that it is shameful for women to speak in church, but correct to ask their husbands for explanations at home

Those are first warnings about distinguishing the Pauline Paul from the Lukan Paul by separation and discrimination

he converted not from Judaism to Christianity, of course, but from violent opponent and persecutor of pagan inclusion to nonviolent proponent and persuader of pagan inclusion. That which he persecuted for God was exactly that to which he was called by God.

with Paul, with dusty, tired, much-traveled Paul, came Rome’s most dangerous opponent—not legions but ideas, not an alternative force but an alternative faith.

Christians must have understood, then, that to proclaim Jesus as Son of God was deliberately denying Caesar his highest title and that to announce Jesus as Lord and Savior was calculated treason.

Had Peter and the others ever believed that kosher was still mandatory for their salvation, they could not so easily have omitted it.

There is perhaps no more compelling voice on this subject than John Dominic Crossan, the professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University and a former ordained priest. In Who Killed Jesus?, he asks whether the Gospels’ incendiary depiction of the tribunal before Pilate was “a scene of Roman history” or “Christian propaganda.” He answered the question, in part, with the following passage: “However explicable its origins, defensible its invectives, and understandable its motives among Christians fighting for survival, its repetition has now become the longest lie, and, for our own integrity, we Christians must at last name it as such.

Christ is the norm, the criterion, the purpose, and the meaning of the book. The book points to Christ; Christ does not point to the book. We are not the People of the Book; we are the People with the Book. The Gospel of John does not say, “God so loved the world that he gave us” a book (3:16). The Revelation of John does not say that we are saved “by the ink of the Lamb” (12:11). For over a hundred years Christians have asked WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) and not WWBS? (What Would the Bible Say?). If Christ is the norm of the gospel, then he is also the norm of the New Testament, and of the entire Christian Bible. That, of course, is why we are called Christ-ians and not Bible-ians.

[W]e pray that [this domination-free order] - God’s kingdom - might come on earth every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” But we often miss the connection because of the cadence with which we most frequently pray this prayer: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” is separated by a single-beat pause from “on earth, as it is in heaven.” But the syntax is clear: we are praying for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth. As Dominic Crossan comments: heaven is already in good shape; what we pray for is that the kingdom of God may also be on earth. That is the dream of God.

The problem is that, slowly but surely across the past two hundred years of scholarly research, we have learned that the gospels are exactly what they openly and honestly claim they are. They are not history, though they contain history. They are not biography, though they contain biography. They are gospel—that is, good news. Good indicates that the news is seen from somebody’s point of view—from, for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation.

The good news, for Luke-Acts, is that the Holy Spirit moved headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome. The Holy Spirit, apparently, did not cross the Euphrates to the north or the Nile to the south but only the Mediterranean to the west. Each of those twin volumes, and one no more or less than the other, is theology rather than history. It is our problem if we wanted journalism. We received gospel instead.

Augustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and human conjunction of Apollo and Atia. How does the historian respond to that story? Are there any who take it literally or even bracket its transcendental claims as beyond historical judgment or empirical test? Classical historians, no matter how religious, do not usually do so. That divergence raises an ethical problem for me. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augustus and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and miraculously or all of them should be accepted metaphorically and theologically. It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one’s own story. This, then,

Perhaps illiterate people have particularly good memories to compensate for being unable to write things down, just as the blind are popularly believed to have especially keen ears or sensitive fingers. Such arguments must be rejected…. And while it would be logically possible to argue that literacy and schooling make memory worse, the fact of the matter is that they don’t. On the contrary: cross-cultural studies have generally found a positive relation between schooling and memory…. Skilled performances by oral poets are found only in nonliterate societies because the concept of poetry itself changes when literacy appears…. Literal, verbatim memory does exist, nevertheless. It makes its appearance whenever a performance is defined by fidelity to a particular text. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed, pp. 241–242

I had observed that the parabolic stories by Jesus seemed remarkably similar to the resurrection stories about Jesus. Were the latter intended as parables just as much as the former? Had we been reading parable, presuming history, and misunderstanding both, at least since literalism deformed both pro-Christian and anti-Christian imagination in response to the Enlightenment? Think, for example, of the Jerusalem to Jericho road with its Good Samaritan and the Jerusalem to Emmaus road with its Incognito Jesus after the resurrection. Most everyone accepts the former (Luke 10:30–35) as a fictional story with a theological message, but what about the latter (Luke 24:13–33)? Is the latter story fact or fiction, history or parable? Many would say this latter story actually happened. But why is that so, when just a few chapters earlier a similar story is considered pure fiction, completely parable? We need to look at that question a little closer.

Eschatology is one of the great and fundamental options of the human spirit. It is a profoundly explicit no to the profoundly implicit yes by which we usually accept life’s normalcies, culture’s presuppositions, and civilization’s discontents. It is a basic and unusual world-negation or rejection as opposed to an equally basic but more usual world-affirmation or acceptance. For myself, left to myself, I would prefer to bury the term eschatological and use instead a term such as world-negation. But I presume that eschatological is here to stay, so I continue to use it.

The Greek is importantly different: “Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God

We can all agree not to do what is unnatural, but we still have to negotiate what is or is not unnatural.

The popular religion and culture of peasants in a complex society are not only a syncretized, domesticated, and localized variant of larger systems of thought and doctrine. They contain almost inevitably the seeds of an alternative symbolic universe—a universe which in turn makes the social world in which peasants live less than completely inevitable. Much of this radical symbolism can only be explained as a cultural reaction to the situation of the peasantry as a class. In fact, this symbolic opposition represents the closest thing to class consciousness in pre-industrial agrarian societies. It is as if those who find themselves at the bottom of the social heap develop cultural forms which promise them dignity, respect, and economic comfort which they lack in the world as it is. A real pattern of exploitation dialectically produces its own symbolic mirror image within folk culture…. The radical vision to which I refer is strikingly uniform despite the enormous variations in peasant cultures and the different great traditions of which they partake…. At the risk of over-generalizing, it is possible to describe some common features of this reflexive symbolism. It nearly always implies a society of brotherhood in which there will be no rich and poor, in which no distinctions of rank and status (save those between believers and non-believers) will exist. Where religious institutions are experienced as justifying inequities, the abolition of rank and status may well include the elimination of religious hierarchy in favor of communities of equal believers. Property is typically, though not always, to be held in common and shared. All unjust claims to taxes, rents, and tribute are to be nullified. The envisioned utopia may also include a self-yielding and abundant nature as well as a radically transformed human nature in which greed, envy, and hatred will disappear. While the earthly utopia is thus an anticipation of the future, it often harks back to a mythic Eden from which mankind has fallen away” (1977:224–226).

that reason and revelation or history and theology or research and faith—by whatever names—cannot contradict one another unless we have one or both wrong.

John Meier’s A Marginal Jew and my Historical Jesus as the front-page Christmas story in The New York Times for December 23, 1991. His story “Peering Past Faith to Glimpse the Jesus of History” was

From House through Land to Earth it should always be a matter of distributive justice and restorative righteousness

distributive justice is the primary meaning of the word “justice” and that retributive justice is secondary and derivative.

Put another way: justice is about the fair distribution of the subject involved. In the Bible, it is primarily about a fair distribution of God’s world for all of God’s people. For example, when the Bible cries out for justice, can one really think it is demanding retribution?

I have argued in this chapter that the Christian Bible presents us with a God of nonviolent distributive justice but also one of violent retributive justice.

He only said what Christianity has never been able to follow, that within it all are equal and this is to be its witness and challenge to the world outside.

does a search for Paul bring Theoklia, women, and equality back steadily and inevitably into the light

According to Borg and Crossan, the way to understand Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey is to appreciate the story of Jerusalem. Key to this story is the role of the city as the “center of the domination system

John Dominic Crossan demonstrates convincingly through art that “the West lost and the East kept the original Easter vision.

But Genesis adds one very significant extra element in its summary of civilization’s Mesopotamian dawn. The mark of Cain becomes the mark of civilization.

The same sort of controversy that took place in broader imperial society between ascetic radicals and authoritarian conservatives occurred within the Church itself,” as Francis argued; “and just as pagan society ultimately found a way to incorporate the radicals into its ranks, so did the Church. In both, radical ascetics were shorn of their threat, liminized, heroized, and transformed from rivals to authority (whether of emperor or bishop) into allies of that authority and paragons of its values. Seen in this perspective, Christian monasticism amounts to an institutional domestication and incorporation of radicalism—a theory that would profoundly affect the study of Church history

While that term “middle classes” may be inaccurate for first-century realities, the distinction between “declined” or “born” into poverty is crucial for understanding Jesus and his first companions. I accept, therefore, Theissen’s proposal and Stegemann’s emphasis that the kingdom-of-God movement began by making “an ethical virtue out of social necessity”—that is, by refusing to accept the injustice they were experiencing as normal and acceptable to God. Those first itinerants were, like Jesus himself, primarily dispossessed peasant freeholders, tenants, or sharecroppers. They were not invited to give up everything but to accept their loss of everything as judging not them but the system that had done it to them. It was ethical to accept the abandonment of such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy.

(Desmond Tutu: “God, without us, will not; as we, without God cannot.”)

But a participatory eschatology demanded a participatory pedagogy, a collaborative message demanded a collaborative medium. In other words, parables were the perfect—even necessary and inevitable—medium for that precise message.