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A useful myth, with footnotes. • • • • • (bewertet mit 3 von 5 Punkten) Alle meine Rezensionen ansehen Rezension bezieht sich auf: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (Taschenbuch) This book comes in an unusual long, narrow shape, as if to emphasize the unorthodox character of Crossan's approach. His argument is well-written and adorned with interesting background details, and even some good insights. But as a whole, I found that argument far more of a stretch than the book itself. Crossan begins by begging the question. Suppose, he asks, you wanted to go behind the "screen" of "credal interpretation" that are the Gospels for an impartial account of the historical Jesus "as distinct from the confessional Christ?" (Yes. But what if we first ask if the two are distinct, before we ask how they are distinct?) Crossan dismisses academics who come to orthodox conclusions as phoney scholars. But if, on that account, you expect a dispassionate and scholarly approach from Crossan, don't hold your breath. Crossan makes two assumptions in regard to Biblical material. 1) Don't trust materials from after 60 A.D. 2) No argument should stand on the strength of only one independent attestation. With that, unfortunately, a vast amount of non-Jesus seminar history slides into the abyss. The life of Confucius, for example, has only one near source, the Analects. Yet the vast majority of scholars believe, on the grounds of internal evidence of that source, that we have a basically reliable record of Confucius' life and teachings. (For reasons that apply even more strongly in the case of the Gospels.) Furthermore, the Mencius, written more than a hundred years later, is thought to contain accurate information about his life. Unlike Confucius, Jesus died young, and his followers were no doubt younger, and could easily have lived well past Crossan's arbitrary date. If my grandmother, who wrote poetry to the age of 95, had been the little girl Jesus raised from the dead, she could have written a first-hand account of the incident in 105 A.D. Living here in Nagasaki, Japan, were I to write an account of the nuclear holocaust 55 years later (=80 A.D.), I wouldn't even have to look for eyewitnesses, still in perfect health and with perhaps decades left to live. So it seems to me these two assumptions are fine pieces of nonsense. Crossan also commits gross fallacies of classification. For example, he says most Galilean peasants were illiterate. Jesus was a peasant; therefore he believes (despite Gospel accounts to the contrary) Jesus was illiterate. Consider what we can do with this method. Mohatma Gandhi and Abraham Lincoln were lawyers. Most lawyers are dishonest. Therefore Lincoln and Gandhi were untruthful. It staggers me to think a respected professor could call such an absurd piece of reasoning "scholarship." Crossan also liberally employs the age-old method of "reading between the lines" that C.S.Lewis so crushingly rebuked in his classic (and still devastating) essay, Fernseed and Elephants. Josephus and the Apostle John both wrote about John the Baptist. Crossans adds the two accounts, psychoanalyzes the principles, assumes they were lying about whatever facts they relate that fit their theologies, then fills the resulting holes with what he thinks they must have been covering up. Based on no real evidence, and denying what evidence we have, he concludes that John the Baptist was "not talking about Jesus at all" but was an "apocalyptic preacher" announcing the arrival of an "imperial conquerer." "We can almost guess what John must have been doing by reading between the lines." Of course we can, if we are endowed with such powers as John Crossan. We can even deduce "a huge web of apocalyptic expectations, a network of ticking timebombs all over the Jewish homeland" that was the following of the Baptist, whether they leave trace in the historical record or not. Come on, John. At least Joseph Smith had peep stones to work with. Such are Crossan's usual methods of reasoning. Were I to give all such examples, to paraphrase the apostle John, the World Wide Web itself might not contain all the evidences of Crossan's preturnatural powers. I cringe to think what my professors in grad school would have said if I had turned in arguments of the sort Crossan habitually employs. But in one sense, Crossan deserves his audience. He has created a useful myth with footnotes, a well-written and resourceful Humanist apocrypha that can be hugely useful to those who share his creed. Revolutionary Biography fits into a long tradition of religious spin doctors who sanitize Jesus for their various constituencies. For those who are interested in that tradition (and it is a very interesting story) my new book Jesus and the Religions of Man discusses the Humanist "historical Jesus" in the larger context of Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Marxist, and Mormon tall tales about Jesus. A few reviewers below argue that "No one can know what Jesus really said or did." I think, on the contrary, everyone can know. I do not think anyone would have made up the Gospel accounts as we have them. I don't think anyone could have made them up. Not everyone likes the Jesus who appears in them, but then, not everyone liked Jesus in person, either. Everyone had reason to disbelieve. Books like Crossan's are evidence that the world has come a long way since then in dealing with the problem of Jesus, in terms of scholarly refinement. author, Jesus and the Religions of Man d.marshall@sun.ac.jp Eine Rezension von Ein Kunde vom 9. Juli 2000 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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