“Who do you say that I am?” When Jesus posed this question to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel, Peter emphatically and faithfully replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And what might the answer be today? Three newly published scholarly books put forward a startlingly revisionist reply. While Jesus may have been a carpenter, that probably meant he was illiterate and belonged to a low caste of artisans. He did not preach salvation from sin through sacrifice; he never said “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God”; neither did he say “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” For that matter, he probably never delivered the Sermon on the Mount. As for the question posed to Peter and the disciples, Jesus never asked it. And he never cured any diseases. As for the other miracles? No loaves and fishes, no water into wine, no raising of Lazarus. And certainly no resurrection. What happened to his body then? Most likely it was consumed by wild dogs. Until now, this sort of Bah, humbug! approach to the Scriptures was in full display largely in the rarefied and theologically correct atmosphere of seminaries and elite universities. John Dominic Crossan, a Bible scholar at DePaul University, notes that there was an “implicit deal — you scholars can go off to the universities and write in the journals and say anything you want.” Now, he says, “the scholars are coming out of the closet,” demanding public attention for the way they think. Among the latest such works are Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography , Burton Mack’s The Lost Gospel and The Five Gospels . For Crossan, Jesus’ deification was akin to the worship of Augustus Caesar — a mixture of myth, propaganda and social convention. It was simply a thing that was done in the ancient Mediterranean world. Christ’s pedigree — his virgin birth in Bethlehem of Judea, home of his reputed ancestor King David — is retrospective mythmaking by writers who had “already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus,” Crossan says. The journey to Bethlehem from Nazareth, he adds, is “pure fiction, a creation of Luke’s own imagination.” He speculates that Jesus may not even have been Mary’s firstborn and that the man the Bible calls his brother James was the eldest child. Crossan argues that Jesus did not cure anyone but that he did “heal” people by refusing to ostracize them because of their illnesses.
