Dialogue on The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan (Preface and Prologue)

About the Dialogue: Punkabilly invited Bookpress to read and discuss The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan. Bookpress agreed and suggested that the conversation be posted here. Bookpress is a confessionally reformed Christian. Punkabilly is an agnostic. Though the format is flexible, we intend to discuss a chapter a week. One participant will write roughly 500-700 words on the chapter in question and the other participant will write a piece of similar length in response. You are welcome to join the discussion by commenting.

Bookpress’s Take: It won’t surprise you to learn that I anticipate a good deal of disagreement with Crossan. I expect that he will raise more questions and challenges to my faith in any given chapter than I will be able to research in a week or answer in word limit. Still, I expect this to be a fruitful exercise. As I’ve mentioned to you earlier, I am currently reading The Resurrection of Jesus: John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright in Dialogue and plan to begin N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God shortly. If I reference these or other works in my response to Crossan, I’ll try to cite with some specificity.

In the Prologue, Crossan covers visions and Platonic dualism. He asserts that visions of the dead were common in Christ’s time and that they are common today. Clearly he lays the groundwork here for a claim that Christ was not bodily resurrected from the tomb, but that those recorded in Scripture as having seen the risen Christ saw, in fact, only a vision – perhaps due to sorrow. This though leads to the problem that this vision of a dead man birthed Christianity. So, Crossan asks, what is different about this vision? He answers the question with the hypothesis that underlies his book – that “the birth of Christianity is the interaction between the historical Jesus and his first companions and the continuation of that relationship despite his execution.” This interaction and the reasons for it are the focus of Crossan’s work in this book.

Crossan makes much of beginning with Jesus rather than with Paul. In fact, he challenges the reader “If you begin with Paul, you will interpret Jesus incorrectly; if you begin with Jesus, you will interpret Paul differently” (p. xxi, author’s emphasis). My disagreement with Crossan on this foundational issue stems from my belief that all Scripture is “God-breathed” to use the term from II Timothy 3:16. If Scripture is correct in this self-attesting statement, and if it is also correct that there is no variation with God (James 1:17), then we would expect consistency in the teaching of Scripture.

Several pages of the Prologue focus on Platonic dualism (which Crossan identifies in a compromised form, and that applied inconsistently, in Paul’s writings), but I’ll skip that for now. I’m sure there will be plenty of talk about that as we get into the text itself. I’d like to jump ahead to Crossan’s plan for the book. He identifies four key questions around which the book is structured. First, Crossan discusses why he is “reconstructing the continuity from the historical Jesus to earliest Christianity . . . .” Next, he explains where he finds his sources. Third, he covers how he does it, and finally, he offers what he finds when he applies his method. I’m most interested in the last three of these questions, so hopefully he covers the why pretty quickly.

Punkabilly’s Response: I asked Bookpress to participate in this exercise with me for admttedly selfish reasons: I am attempting to answer many questions that have been nagging at me for quite some time and I feel like this amy be a beneficial place to start. I was raised in a “fundamental, Bible-believing Independent Baptist Church” and also attended the associated school from the ages of four to seventeen. I was inundated with the church’s doctrine and, having had time to breathe and formulate my own opinions, I feel it is important that I now set out to answer some of the questions that have surfaced since my “deconversion.”

I don’t know that this text will fulfill all of my expectations by laying all of my questions to rest and easing my mind but I’m certain it will answer one of the foundational questions I have: Who was the historical Jesus and what was it about his life that spurred others on to follow his teachings? My initial question has many sub questions of which I don’t expect enlightenment from this text: Is the original intent of Christ being taught, sought and followed through modern Christianity? What did Jesus’ church look like and what was its message? Could it be that humans have imparted their own value judgments on Christ and his followers and forced Christianity to assume roles other than what where originally intended?

Current statistics place the United States as the global leader in Christianity. Some sources state that nearly one-third of the world’s population is “born again” with America leading the pack at more than 85% of its population claiming conversion. Those figures, however, are undoubtedly substantially lower due to the incessant infighting between different factions of Christianity. So . . . how did we get here from there? Im hopeful that this book will help me in answering some of these questions. From what I gather, Crossan takes great pains in re-explaining and reevaluating and reasserting each claim that he potentially makes so this could be a rather slow read. I don’t know that you will get your wish by having him cover the “whys” quickly.

Crossan does not subscribe to the views of Platonic dualism; he doesn’t believe that the soul and the body can be separated or that one can live free from the other. It can be assumed that under this view, any belief in a literal heaven is completely abolished because once the physical dies so too does the spiritual. Crossan denied that the “inner struggle” between spirit and flesh is one of divine imposition but one of self imposition.

Words From The Bruised Reed

[I]f God brings us into the trial he will be with us in the trial, and at length bring us out, more refined. We shall lose nothing but dross (Zech. 13:9). From our own strength we cannot bear the least trouble, but by the Spirit’s assistance we can bear the greatest. The Spirit will add his shoulders to help us bear our infirmities. The Lord will give his hand to heave us up (Psa. 37:24).

The Bruised Reed by Richard Sibbes, pp. 54-5.

January 2007 Summary and Reviewlets

This year’s reading got off to a good start. Well, the fiction did. I clearly need to get started on some of the longer term projects.

I should note also that I am, beginning with this post, going to use my blog for personal gain. Slight personal gain, but personal gain none the less. Some books now have thumbnail cover images next to the title. Clicking on the image or the title of these books will open the appropriate page of the Westminster Bookstore rather than a LibraryThing page. LT links will still be used for books not available at wtsbooks.

Westminster just began offering gift certificates to blogs that generate traffic for their site. Bookpress won’t generate a huge number of hits for wtsbooks, but the potential of a discounted book should not be, um, discounted. I’m pleased to link to wtsbooks because they have genuinely great prices and godly aims.

I order more than $10,000 of books a year from wtsbooks (not, unfortunately, for my personal library) and have never been disappointed with condition, price, or service. I hope you find this change to be mutually beneficial. On to the January 2007 reading.

At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald – Another of Fitzgerald’s short novels. Here the story centers on a training school for young actors in London. The training school is on the wane, and the most of adults (owner, staff, teachers, potential investor) fight the inevitable with a mixture of apathy and disdain. Maturity and understanding belong to the child actors – but not in a precocious manner. The book is the same clear, short arc Fitzgerald was so adept at creating. It is though, in the end, as somber as most of her other work.

The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt – Byatt always brings out one of my reading quirks; I often think, even as I am reading, that I would enjoy a book more if I possessed some knowledge. While reading this novel, I found myself wishing I had read Ibsen and knew more about the Maelstrom. Even without such background knowledge, I thoroughly enjoyed this work. In it, a grad student abandons his studies in pomo lit for the more real discipline of biography. Lacking direction, he decides to write the biography of a biographer of whom little is known. His finds and attempts to reconstruct his subject’s research on Galton, Ibsen, and Linneaus. Though not a match for Byatt’s astounding Possession, there is a great deal of life in The Biographer’s Tale.

The Atonement by Leon Morris – Morris does a great job of presenting different aspects of Christ’s atonement in a helpful and understandable way. He covers covenant, sacrifice, the day of atonement, the Passover, redemption, reconciliation, propitiation, and justification. I found the chapters on reconciliation and propitiation to be particularly instructive because I had not previously understood them clearly. The book contains dozens of little nuggets that deepened my understanding of Christ’s work. I appreciate Morris’s labors on this volume and recommend it to all believers.

Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas-Llosa – I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Peru, but only Lima. In Death in the Andes, Vargas-Llosa (Peru’s most famous novelist) provides a riveting introduction to both the culture, recent history, and spiritualism of the mountain region. Two Civil Guard officers are posted to a mining camp in the middle of Sendero territory. They try to learn from the taciturn laborers who is responsible for three murders that are thought to have taken place. Vargas-Llosa shifts rapidly between conversation and memory with only context to guide the reader. Not a simple novel, but a valuable picture of the resignation many experience under oppression.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler – An absolutely convoluted plot, but nobody really reads Chandler for plot, right? The unchallenged master of the hard-boiled detective novel, this is the one book to read to introduce yourself to the genre.

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster – A collection of three long stories (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room) that reaches back to classic detective novels for inspiration and weaves in metafiction and other elements of postmodernism. The result is an incredibly satisfying almost-novel that I would recommend to anyone seeking an introduction to experimental fiction.

The Faith of Israel by William J. Dumbrell – Dumbrell examines each book of the Old Testament, focusing first on the purpose of the book and then on the thematic relationships within and among them. I found this to be an extremely valuable book that I would recommend to any dedicated student of Scripture as a reference resource. I will note that it took me fifty pages or so to really understand what Dumbrell was doing – and even longer to really see the benefit. The more you read, the more valuable the information you have already obtained becomes. Having read it through once, I expect that The Faith of Israel will be even more helpful to me when I return to it while studying books of the Old Testament.

Posterspotting

I noticed an ad in a Metro station the other day that reflected a very different reality than that indicated by my Bookspotting. In the left half of the ad, a male subway rider has his nose stuck in a romance novel. The tag: “Average subway reading”. On the right half of the ad, this same guy is lost in Plato’s Republic. The tag: “Greater Washington subway reading”.

I understand that the group behind the ad is trying to tout Washington as a place with lots of brainy, well-educated people – but my initial Bookspotting posts should demonstrate that Metro isn’t exactly bursting at the seams with people reading the great books. Well, that’s Washington for you; we portray ourselves as self-important, pretentious twits in even our subway ads.

Bookspotting – 020107

Work has been a bit busier than usual, so my posting has dropped off. More troubling, my reading has dropped off as well. Now that I’m caught up with work, I’m trying to get back into the books. This post will have to do until I can get January’s reviewlets up.

I caught these books on an Orange line train just over a week ago: No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan, Facing Tyson: Fifteen Fighters, Fifteen Stories by Ted A. Kluck, Mouth to Mouth by Erin McCarthy, and The Innocent Man by John Grisham.

Kind of an interesting assortment to find on the same car: religion/current affairs, sports, chicklit, and pop true crime. One of the great parts of riding public transportation in a fairly diverse metro area.