Bad assumptions, unwarrented conclusions
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My education at UCLA wasn't all that good. Much of what the professors taught as "stable, reliable, scientific facts" have subsiquently turned out to be incorrect. The one thing I did learn was a love for logic. I learned how to spot fallacious reasoning, unwarrented jumps (nonsequitors), and best of all ***unsubstantiated asumptions***. This book is really a collection of the last two items. I was truly disapointed by the number of suspect assumptions made by the author, and the enormous conclusions derived from these assumptions. Basically, to accept his argument, you must accept the proposition that (A) the gospels are only propoganda for Christianity, and (B) therefore contain little factual value. If you do not accept (A) or (B) the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Moreover, to love this work, you must believe that a historical fact should be erased from the record if it is dangerous to any one group of people. This is the historical revisionist argument wrapped in sympathy.
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Christianity is not to blame for anti-Semitism
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Crossan is missing the point. No one killed Jesus. He chose to give His life on the cross. To tie Christianity with anti-Semitism is ludicrous. I can not believe that one man would dedicate so much time to such heresy.
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You can't understand European history without it
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A riveting and much needed book! Analyzes religious propaganda which was included in the New Testament by the early Christian church in which the Jews are blamed for the execution of Jesus. Crossan shows how that this did not really matter at the time, because Christianity was just a bunch of disconnected movements without much power. But after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, these passages were used in programs of Jewish extermination. The Nazi Holocaust was built on this Christian foundation.
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Why write this book?
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John Dominic Crossan multiplies his works by mutating one scholarly volume into several "popular" spinoffs, including the present work. The problem with "Who Killed Jesus?" is that, despite its title, which promises an enthralling true-life mystery, the book fails as a "popular" work. Crossan proposes in his introduction to answer another scholarly work, which he finds too sympathetic to the theory of historical origin for the Gospels, by pointing out that many of the incidents involving the death and resurrection of Jesus are really adaptations of Old Testament prophecy. Such an "answer" is perfectly suited to an essay in a scholarly journal, but certainly not to a monograph intended for the "masses". Moreover, as in most Crossan texts, the author quotes long, undigested passages from his sources, which is quite tedious to the general reader. As to the content of the volume, the case for the composition of the gospels based on Old Testament prophecy has been made succinctly, and quite disturbingly, by other modern, liberal NT scholars, (even though they cannot explain how, if the prophecies are the source of fictions about Jesus, they are more clearly "plagiarized" in Matthew than in Mark, although Matthew is agreed to be the later author), but in the present volume, this thesis is mired in polimics and is further bogged down in Crossan's premise that an early version of the second-century Gospel of Peter fragment is the source of the canonical gospel narratives. I ask again: "Why write this book?"
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