After reading through my review of Crossan’s The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant and chatting with Jana about it, I realized that I missed a couple of key points:

I don’t necessarily agree with Crossan’s peasant cynic revolutionary rendition of Jesus. In the prologue, Crossan makes this pithy remark: “It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography” (p.xxviii). In other words, feminist scholars often excavate a feminist Jesus, some middle-class scholars envision a educated and literate Jesus with a skilled craftsman/artisan for a father, etc. I wonder if Crossan, the son of poor Irish Catholics, didn’t fall a bit into the trap of self-projection himself.

Nevertheless, I think that J. D. Crossan has raised the bar on historical Jesus research. It is my hope that future scholars will feel the pressure to be much more rigorous in their research and more careful with their methodology thanks to Crossan’s influence.