Word: crossan
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...Crossan was deep into what might be called the postmodern state of Bible studies. Experts had long considered sources for the Gospels undreamed of by Luther: passages from Luke and Matthew, for instance, that did not reflect the earlier written Mark but corresponded to one another were ascribed to a document known as Q, a bare-bones collection of sayings. In the 1980s, radicals took a large step farther. They suggested that only Q and similarly minimalist early documents, real and notional, might constitute authentic reporting; the rest of the Gospels was mostly tacked-on religious revisionism...
...dogma. They did not, however, all detect the same Jesus. Harvard's Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, for example, has located a feminist paragon who saw God as Sophia (Wisdom) and himself as her spokesperson; Fiorenza contends the later church cloaked Jesus in the Christological garb as the Son of God. Crossan, relying heavily on the apocryphal Gospels of Thomas and Peter and the secret Gospel of Mark, has posited a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant...
...envisioned by Crossan in The Historical Jesus (and backed by his formidable scholarship), Jesus was concerned less with his Father's kingdom, as traditionally understood, than with bucking what the ex-priest has called "the standard political normalcies of power and privilege, hierarchy and oppression, debt foreclosure and land appropriation, imperial exploitation and colonial collaboration." This Tom Joad-ish Christ did not so much heal illnesses as cure false consciousness; his body was eaten by dogs at the foot of the Cross. Crossan has summarized his message as "God says, 'Caesar sucks...
...compelling argument. At a time when the airwaves were full of televangelists touting the New Testament as God-inspired, inerrant (correct in all ways) and supportive of right-wing views, here was a channel for another viewpoint. "Bob Funk's Jesus is quite different from my Jesus," Crossan says. But both longed to get beyond what they saw as the prevailing attitude toward historical questioning: "Don't say it out in public, don't bring it into the churches...
...Crossan's wish that the message reach the public was granted. It would be hard to find a newspaper in America that hasn't done a story on the Seminar over the past decade. That's obvious upon reading Luke Timothy Johnson, who seems to quote most of them in his book-length, outraged response to the Seminar, The Real Jesus...