The Quest for the Historical Jesus

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

John Dominic Crossan vs. Dale Allison:

Two Different Ways to Look at Mysterious Figure

For someone so well known, Jesus is someone the historical world knows little about. Around this religious figure revolves a strange phenomena. Most people could probably tell you something Jesus stood for, or the gist of something he said, just off the top of their head. But someone who has spent years studying Jesus within a historical context, would probably have a hard time pinpointing anything Jesus really said. Scholars have been interested, and even obsessed with the historical Jesus for centuries, and two of the most well known Jesus scholars of today are Dale C. Allison and John Dominic Crossan. Yet how they go about examining the historical Jesus is completely different.

First, we are going to explore Crossan’s technique, a process that he calls the triple triadic method. Then we are going to look at how Allison goes about studying the historical Jesus. Next we are going to look at a miracle of Jesus through the eyes of Crossan, and compare that to how Allison looks at different texts to fit with his own theory. While they both use the bible, the theory of Q, and to some extent the gospel of Thomas, the value they put on the texts differ.

Crossan’s triple triadic method is comprised of what he describes as “The campaign, the strategy, and the tactics”. The first triad is anthropology, and within that is the three levels of cross-temporal social anthropology, Hellenistic or Greco-Roman history, and the literature that involves Jesus. He stresses the importance of all three of those levels lining up, equally. Crossan keeps within the theme of threes when he also stakes claim that within the ...

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...the Kingdom of Rome.

But most importantly it fits in with the anthropological views of the time. When discussing exorcisms, Crossan likes to keep two factors in mind. One, is that the colonial people tended to be in an schizoid position, because whether or not they submitted to colonization, or hated it, they were ultimately admitting their weakness against a foreign invasion and assisting in their own destruction. When Jesus cast out Beelzebul, the people reportedly both marveled and questioned, creating a symbol of a revolutionary. Crossan also uses the Gerasene Demoniac as an example of how the people of the times, and stories within the Jesus tradition, represent a revolution. (However because the Gerasene Demoniac only has single attestation, Crossan only likes to use it for general background and not as a specific claim towards the historical Jesus).