Watch the 22-minute video or listen to the audio file?
Overture. 3-page narrative of Jesus’ life; 25 pages of the sayings of Jesus (i-xxvi).
Prologue (methodology, to be summarized at the end)
Part I. The Brokered Empire (“Brokered” here refers to the complex tissue of one-to-one personal relationships in which help was given in the Greco-Roman world of antiquity in which Jesus lived; brokering could be done by powerful and wealthy patrons for clients or in relationships of social equality. In religion, brokerage refers to a mediator (as opposed to dealing directly with God.)
Part II. Embattled Brokerage (In various ways, this social system had problems that led to various forms of conflict)
Part III. Brokerless Kingdom (Jesus’ kingdom—unstructured, egalitarian, embracing nobodies and outcasts without regard for the differences between Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, male and female—brought humanity and divinity together, physically and spiritually, without any intermediary; and brought humanity together, person to person, physically and spiritually in the reciprocity of the healer (or wonder-worker) eating with, and in the home of, the person receiving the wonder-ful blessing.
Here’s a one-paragraph summary of the book, which is given in the epilogue at the end of the book. Jesus was a Jew, heavily influenced by a Gentile philosophy in the ancient world called Cynicism.
His work was among the farms and villages of Lower Galilee. His strategy, implicitly for himself and explicitly for his followers, was the combination of free healing and common eating, a religious and economic egalitarianism that negated alike and at once the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power. And, lest he himself be interpreted as simply the new broker of a new God, he moved on constantly, settling down neither at Nazareth nor Capernaum. He was neither broker or mediator but, somewhat paradoxically, the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to force individuals into unmediated physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God. (422)
The central chapter in the book is chapter 13, Magic and Meal. This chapter builds on four main strands of research, including, most of all, the work of Bryan Wilson—which I emphasize because I believe it applies to our world today. This first passage comes from much earlier in the book (p. 73).
. . . Bryan Wilson [has written a fascinating study] on religious movements of protest among tribal and Third-World peoples, but that . . . work is especially useful because it proposes a sevenfold typology based on the diverse ways in which people respond to the world when salvation from evil is no longer found adequately within the standard religious resources of their tradition. Granted of course, the [diverse meanings] of evil and therefore of any transcendent salvation from it, and using God as “the convenient symbol for supernatural power, however that power is conceived and designated in particular cultures,” he established seven reactions grouped in three sets according to where the emphasis falls among the movement of response/to/the world (22-26).
The first group is Conversionists, who, as subjectivists, place primary emphasis on response to the world. They believe that “God will change us.” Since the world is corrupt because people are corrupt, salvation comes only through “a profoundly felt, supernaturally wrought transformation of the self.” Next are two groups who, as relationists, place primary emphasis on response to the world. Manipulationists believe that “God calls us to change perception.” People must learn the right means, facilities, techniques so as “to alter their relation to the word, to see the world differently.” Thaumaturgists [wonder-workers] believe that “God will grant particular dispensations and work specific miracles.” Salvation is conceived much more narrowly than in the preceding case, is particularistic, personal, local, and magical and is very difficult to generalize, organize, and ideologize. Finally there are four groups who, as objectivists, place primary emphases on response to the world. Revolutionists believe that “God will overturn” the world. In this case, “only the destruction of the world, of the natural, but more specifically of the social, order, will suffice.” This presumes divine and imminent action, with or without human participation. Introversionists believe that “God calls us to abandon” the world. It is so irredeemably evil that one must withdraw completely, either alone or with and into “a separated community preoccupied with its own holiness and its means of insulation from the wider society.” Reformists believe that “God calls us to amend” the world. This response is very close to secular improvement programs except that it presumes “supernaturally-given insights about the ways in which social organization should be amended.” Utopians believe that “God calls us to reconstruct” the world. This presumes “some divinely given principles” of reconstruction, is much more radical than the reformist alternative, but unlike the revolutionist option, insists much more on the role human beings must take in the process.
Chapter 13 begins with this epigraph from a book by Joseph Klausner.
The complete visionary and mystic exerts an influence only upon other visionaries like himself, and his influence soon passes. The man of practical wisdom, alert in worldly matters only, merely influences the brain while leaving the heart untouched; and never in this world was anything great achieved unless the heart, deeply stirred, has played its part. Only where mystic faith is yoked with practical prudence does there follow a strong, enduring result. And of such a nature was the influence exerted by Jesus of Nazareth upon his followers, and through them, upon succeeding generations.
Then Crossan begins the chapter by giving excerpts from, and summarizing, Wilson.
At this point four major strands are coming together, and I underline that conjunction before proceeding. The first and most profound strand derives from Bryan Wilson’s sevenfold anthropological and cross-cultural typology of protest movements among colonial peoples. “Men may seek salvation from evil conceived in many forms—from anxiety; illness; inferiority feelings; grief; fear of death; concern for the social order. What they seek may be healing; the elimination of evil agents; a sense of access to power; the enhancement of status; increase of prosperity; the promise of life hereafter, or reincarnation, or resurrection from the grave, or attention from posterity; the transformation of the social order (including the restoration of a real or imagined past social order). . . . Of the various theodicies [ways of portraying harmony between the truth of an ideal deity and the facts of suffering and evil] that organize appropriate promises and command the appropriate activities to cope with these specific apprehensions of evil, two responses are widely found among the less-developed peoples—the thaumaturgical [wonder-working, or “magical”] and the revolutionist” (492). Furthermore, “the thaumaturgical response . . . is a recurrent, and as yet inextinguishable, characteristic of religion. It outcrops in all great religious traditions, and—more vigorously and with far fuller expectation of effectiveness—in the movements which espouse a different deviant response to the world. It stand in tension, often, with the revolutionist response” (131).
Let me now say something of Crossan’s stunning methodology as portrayed in the Prologue. Three disciplines are needed, highly developed, and balanced: (1) social anthropology that hazards generalizations across space and time; (2) Hellenistic or Greco-Roman history; and (3) a mastery of the literature of specific sayings and doings, stories and anecdotes, confessions and interpretations concerning Jesus—both from the Bible and other ancient sources. “It is clear, I hope, that my methodology does not claim an [impossible] objectivity, because almost every step demands a scholarly judgment and an informed decision. I am concerned, not with an unattainable objectivity, but with an attainable honesty.” (xxxiv) The selected data need to be “placed in their historical situation and literary relationship, not because that eliminates controversy but so that a reader knows where one stands on every issue. Every step . . . is more or less controverted, but that fact demands rather than excuses a clear stand on each problem.” (xxxi)
Note! In order to understand the notation used throughout the book, you need to learn the meaning of the symbols explained on page xxxiii.
From the fact that I have celebrated some of the book’s strengths, the reader should not infer that I have no disagreements.
Photo credit: amazon.com
