ETS 2003, Atlanta, Georgia
Excavating Jesus or Inventing a Jesus?
7
While, like his partner Reed, Crossan is indebted to the methodologies of historical criticism,
he is likewise dismayed by the lack of a coherent historical Jesus that those methodologies
have to date presented. He calls the multiple and competing pictures of Jesus thus far pre-
sented an academic embarrassment.
25
Of course, it can be argued that Crossan`s peasant
Jewish cynic is simply another in the panoply of Jesus` that have been postulated by this
methodology. But Crossan`s views have gone well beyond even the secularization that
Pearson decried. For Crossan the traditional liberal view of the Bible (and the gospel ac-
counts) is increasingly a non-viable option. In an interview he stated,
In the case of the historical Jesus, I think you have three options. One is the fundamen-
talist: everything the Bible says must be taken literally. I call the second option the lib-
eral option: not everything in the Bible need be taken literally; but it fails to tell you
where, or what, or when. It defaults on practice, having announced the principle. The
third I would be quite willing to call the radical option. It says, if everything in the Bible
is not taken literally, what are we talking about that should be, that must be, and what
not? I think the liberal option is dying all around us and the options are going to be the
fundamentalist option or the radical option.
26
Arguing that liberalism can no longer be viewed as a viable mediating position, he continued,
But worse than being a rationalist is being a half-rationalist. Worse than being a funda-
mentalist is being a half-fundamentalist, and that`s where many exegetes and theologians
are caught at the moment halfway between rationalism or secularism, and fundamental-
ism.
27
He concluded the interview by stating, I have opted for a radical interpretation of the Bible.
Both fundamental and liberal interpretations foreclose the future. What we are going to have
to try and do is work out some much more powerful way of unifying reason and revelation.
That is what I`m interested in doing.
28
25
Ibid.
26
James Halstead. The Orthodox Unorthodoxy of John Dominic Crossan: An Interview. Cross Currents 45:4
(Winter 95-96): 514.
27
Ibid., p. 515.
28
Ibid., p. 530. In the same interview Crossan affirms inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, but his expla-