Crossan Speaks About Christmas and More


There was a time when biblical scholars lived in ivory towers and talked to themselves but rarely to the general public. Preachers were supposed to carry the news from study to pulpit, but rarely did you get it right from the horses mouth. Well things have changed.

On the Evangelical side there's Tom Wright, the scholarly Bishop of Durham. On the more liberal/progressive side Marcus Borg and Dom Crossan are the most recognizable voices. And now, through a magnificent interview with John Spalding at SoMA Review, we hear directly from Crossan (I must say here that I'm amazed with John does as an editor and an interviewer. When he's published pieces I've written they look so much better than what I sent him I wonder who the author is!).

I had long steered clear of Crossan, even as I dipped into Borg (you know how it is with Borg: "Resistance is Futile"). But lately -- I think it was the jointly written book The Last Week that got me more interested in Crossan. Then I read God and Empire and was even more intrigued. Although I found The First Christmas -- the most recent Borg/Crossan book less riveting that their first book and somewhat derivative in message from God and Empire I remain intrigued both by his interpretation and by his willingness to engage the general public. This is wholesaling of the information -- no clergy middleman (person).

Well, you will enjoy this interview that ranges across the new book, talks about the parabolic nature of the infancy narratives, and more. It's the more that you might find most interesting. He talks about the difficulties in making Jesus movies and offering some suggestions as to what might make a good one -- including the possibility of a film based on The Last Week.


And it’s not that Gibson just went straight to the end of the story. He went right to the most brutal part of the end of the story. He didn’t even cover the final week in the life of Jesus, which Marcus and I examined in our book, “The Last Week.” Now, you really could make a great movie based on our book because it raises the whole question of whether the authorities are going to be able to get Jesus away from the crowd. As long as the crowd is Jesus’ protective screen, they can’t get him without causing a riot. Even though we know how it’s going to end, you really could make a story out of it—one that takes Mark’s account seriously. Here, Jesus goes up to the temple to make a double protestation, and he’s protected by his crowd. And the question the authorities ask is, “Can we get him?”

They also talk about the long rumored possibility that Showgirls and Robocop director Paul Verhoeven (long a participant himself in the Jesus Seminar with Crossan) would make a Jesus movie. Crossan said he'd not heard anything new, but that Verhoeven was thinking of an action film, sort of like Harrison Ford in the Fugitive.

When I asked you about Verhoeven’s Jesus film last year, you mentioned you were surprised to finally learn the direction he wanted to take it.

Yeah. Basically his whole idea was that Jesus had his conflict at the temple early in his ministry, not at the end, and for the rest of the story he’s running from the authorities, like Harrison Ford in “The Fugitive.”

So he envisioned a thriller, an action film.

I think so—a pursuit movie in which Jesus is the odd man out. Verhoeven once told me that Jesus preached “Blessed are the poor” because he himself was poor, and he was poor because he was on the run. But I suggested to him that a great movie could be made by simply using the Rashomon effect with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, collapsing their four visions and having them interplay with each other. And Verhoeven wrote back saying that, yeah, that’d be very interesting.



Check out the interview, come back if you like and we can chat about it, about Jesus, the books, whatever. You can read my reviews of God and Empire here and First Christmas here.

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