John Dominic Crossan was introduced at Epiphany Explorations on Saturday January 19 when he delivered the first of four lectures on the historical Jesus. He was described by Allen Saunders, the lead minister at First Metropolitan United Church in Victoria, which sponsors the annual theological education conference.
   Saunders called him a leading authority on the life of the historical Jesus, the author of 27 books over 40 years, five of which were on the best sellers list, always a sign of controversy with a theologian or Scripture Scholar.
   Not one to take himself too seriously, Dom Crossan, as he likes to be called, said one women had told him that if hell were not in existence, it should be invented for him.

John Dominic Crossan was introduced at Epiphany Explorations on Saturday January 19 when he delivered the first of four lectures on the historical Jesus. He was described by Allen Saunders, the lead minister at First Metropolitan United Church in Victoria, which sponsors the annual theological education conference.
   Saunders called him a leading authority on the life of the historical Jesus, the author of 27 books over 40 years, five of which were on the best sellers list, always a sign of controversy with a theologian or Scripture Scholar.
   Not one to take himself too seriously, Dom Crossan, as he likes to be called, said one women had told him that if hell were not in existence, it should be invented for him.
   For 19 years he was a monk in an Irish Servite Monastery from the age of 16. It was there he said he was given the leisurely pace of studying scripture with absolutely no pressure to teach or publish, purely out of love for his studies. It was this atmosphere and effort that resulted in his landmark work. This depth of erudition makes his scholarship so convincing, challenging and controversial.
   He divided the eight hours of his overall presentation into four parts: a) The World of Jesus’ times, which he called the matrix of the Roman Empire; b) the Life of Jesus in the specific area of Palestine bordering on the north-east corner of the Sea of Galilee. Why did it happen there?; c) The Death of Jesus, how his crucifixion came about in Jerusalem, the political factors at work; d) The Resurrection, the difference between the Western and the Eastern understandings of that faith event.
                                            The World of Jesus’ Time
   The Matrix of Jesus’ times was composed of Empire, Eschaton and Evolution according to Crossan’s understanding. He uses the term matrix as everything you need to know to get the picture of ‘what is going on.’
 Without the matrix, he says, it is like playing basketball without the hoop: Jesus within Judaism within the Roman Empire within the historical evolution of the time.
     Rome was a territorial Empire, he explains. The Roman Legion was all around the periphery so there was peace inside ‘The Pax Romana’. There was little interference in the life within. There did not need to be. The Jews, for example were left to themselves as long as the elite leadership of the Sanhedrin could be controlled by appointments.
   The Emperor had all the same titles which Christians apply to Christ. Lord of All, Son of God, Divine Cesar to be worshipped. The Pax Romana was an enforced ‘peace’ from without. It came about through victory through war, and then there was a lasting peace. Peace through violence.
   At the time of Jesus the Roman Empire was getting stronger. In contrast was the non-violent tradition of Jesus’ Kingdom movement, a reign of utopian peace, and distributive justice as outlined in the Old Testament particularly the Prophets of which Jesus’ cousin John was the latest with his Baptist Movement.
   Where in this context, did such a concept come from? A Kingdom of peace through non-violent justice. Was God violent or non-violent? The question continues today, Crossan says. Even John the Baptist said the change would come about through force. Jesus did not agree.
   His vision was that of the Kingdom based on the experienced reality of the Good Householder. The good household where the animals were cared for, where the family members of the household were provided for and harmony resulted in mature development. Biblical justice was not retributive justice but distributive justice, a fair share for all.
   The eschatology was that at the end of the line that is how the world should be. But when was it going to happen? How to get rid of the Roman Empire where the peace was based on the victory of war through force of violence?
   How to bring about the paradigm shift of peace through justice, by persuasion and non-violent action. John’s Baptist Movement and Jesus Kingdom Movements took place in the same place and time, a very brief window between major suppressions when neither would have been possible.
   Crossan went through the evolutionary rise of escalating violence which led to this crisis of conscience when the Roman authorities moved to crush both John’s and Jesus’ followers and movements.
                                                         The Life of Jesus
   According to Dom Crossan in lecture number two, the King of the Jews Antipas had serious plans to further commercialize the fishery of the Sea of Galilee. This upset everyone from the elite to the rabble. It created a key period of unrest in the region when leaders like John and Jesus had a readier following.
   John especially crossed swords with Herod the Great and paid the ultimate price with his head on a platter. Jesus, Crossan says, learned from John how not to approach the issue, what not to say and how not to say it.
   While John said drastic steps had to be taken to bring about the new kingdom, Jesus insisted it was already here which seemed to many people a radical absurdity. In fancy language, Jesus was announcing the paradigm shift in apocalyptic eschatology. It was the ultimate end of the line for the current oppressive system. It would fall from within by non-violent resistance.
 John announced the arrival of an avenging god while Jesus said the sun was rising on justice in an unjust world. The lesson of John’s execution was not lost on Jesus. Violent revolutionaries were rounded up by the Romans and summarily executed or annihilated from the face of the earth, as Crossan put it. Non-violent revolutionaries like Jesus (and John) were executed as a lesson to their followers who could be relied upon to disperse.
   Barabbas was a violent revolutionary who was released rather than the non-violent preacher Jesus. Why and how did that come about? Crossan dealt with that in his third lecture on the Death of Jesus.
                                                         The Death of Jesus
   Crossan started this section by opening up the concepts of blood Sacrifice and Scapegoat ritual atonement. He debunked the idea that Jesus death was a sacrificial substitution for our sins. He says that this idea is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament or the practices of the ancient cultures.
   This bad theology came much later from Anselm of Canterbury, and there was not a trace of it in the Old or New Testaments.
   This has resulted in an equally bad reading back into the Passion Narrative that Jesus went to Jerusalem to deliberately get himself killed to atone for our sins. On the contrary he was trying not to get himself killed and he almost got away with it.
   Jerusalem was like a tinder box ready to blow up during the Passover period with its liberation from bondage theme. So Jesus and his followers would leave the city every evening and go to Bethany to stay where the situation was safer.
   Crossan took us through the Holy Week one day at a time. On Palm Sunday the crowd was with Jesus. What happened by Thursday when the shift came?  He was protected by the crowd earlier in the week, and was expecting clearly not to be killed.
   Entering Jerusalem on a donkey was a dangerous parody of the Emporer on his charger. There had been serious riots during this period other years. It was a clear lampooning of Roman authority and he got away with the anti-triumphal entry.
   The cleansing of the Temple fits into this context. Jesus was symbolically destroying it and all it represent about co-operation with the Roman authorities.
   Jesus ended up crucified; so what happened? The relationship between the high priest Caiphas and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate was being exposed and derided as the corrupt roots of the unjust system. But the crowd was with Jesus so you would have to get at him under cover of night.
   By mid-week things were moving but it had to be done fast. Get it over with quickly before the people know what is going on. The crowd was said to have changed toward him but how many does it take to make a crowd demanding his crucifixion. The crowd could be staged. The crowd at the end of the week was not the same people as the supportive crowd at the start.
   With a non-violent movement you only had to grab the leader. It could be done with alacrity.
   Why crucify Jesus? Crossan thinks that Pilate judged the threat posed by Jesus correctly. The mystery was how Jesus got away with it so long in such a matrix where the Romans annihilated such movements as a matter of course.
   Any challenge was seen as a challenge to the divinity of the Emperor. Was Jesus a sacrifice for Sin? To Crossan, the real sin was violence and its escalating nature. A life radically dedicated to non-violence, given the historical context, could be expected to be treated like that.
   Prior to Jesus’ birth there had been a radical annihilation of protest in his region. He would have grown up with detailed stories of this, with this as backdrop to what he was attempting. He happened to live in a thirty years lull when his movement could gain some serious impetus.
                                                             Resurrection
   Eastern Christianity’s iconography of the Resurrection is radically different from the West. Prior to each lecture, Dom Crossan presented a video presentation to illustrate the themes and directions his talk would follow. For the fourth lecture he showed the eastern icons which illustrated his thesis that the Resurrection was best understood as communal rather than individualistic.
   By representing the Resurrection as communal, it underlines the reality that the Kingdom is already here, as Jesus claimed.
   Some icons include Adam and Eve and Moses and Abraham all being dragged out of the tomb with Christ.
   The Western vision is of the solitary figure emerging from the Empty tomb but the Eastern image is of the Kingdom of Justice and Peace being represented by the continuity of the Non-violent tradition throughout the ages.