A seminal portrait of Jesus the man in his time--the most important scholarly book about Jesus in decades (Marcus Borg).
He demonstrates that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity.
And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.\' With this ground-breaking work, John Dominic Crossan emphatically sweeps these notions aside.
There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections.
There were always historians who said it could not be done because of Historical problems, writes Crossan.
The conventional wisdom of critical Historical scholarship has long held that too little is known about the Historical Jesus to say definitively much more than that he lived and had a tremendous impact on his followers.
The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it.
It opens with The Gospel of Jesus, Crossan\'s studied determination of Jesus\' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his Life story.
What, they really want to know, can this kingdom of God do for a lame child, a blind parent, a demented soul screaming its tortured isolation among the graves that mark the edges of the village? -- from The Gospel of Jesus, overture to The Historical Jesus The Historical Jesus reveals the true Jesus--who he was, what he did, what he said.
They know all about rule and power, about kingdom and empire, but they know it in terms of tax and debt, malnutrition and sickness, agrarian oppression and demonic possession.
He speaks about the rule of God and they listen as much from curiosity as anything else.
He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine, his walk the proper shuffle.
He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution.
He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee.
In this groundbreaking work, Crossan presents the verifiably original sayings of Jesus and places them in an account where the man who emerges is a savvy, courageous Jewish peasant--both a revolutionary and a compassionate healer.
A seminal portrait of Jesus the man in his time--the most important scholarly book about Jesus in decades (Marcus Borg)
