Scholar Sees Jesus as a Social Revolutionary : Biblical studies: He believes that Christ was a healer, but also an illiterate peasant who never claimed to be the ‘son of God.’ His thesis has drawn fire.

John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus isn’t gentle, meek or mild.

Crossan’s Jesus is an illiterate peasant, both healer and social revolutionary--a Jesus without the Lord’s Prayer, the Last Supper, the Virgin Birth or the Sermon on the Mount. And Crossan’s Jesus would not call himself “son of God” or “son of Man.”

“It is my scholarly opinion that he never said anything like that, and I wouldn’t even say I can see any way how he could have,” said Crossan, a professor of Bible studies at DePaul University and author of “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.”

The book--and Crossan’s theses--have not been universally admired.

“I’ve been getting some very interesting mail,” Crossan said. “The most interesting letter was one that said: ‘If hell had not been created already, it would have to be created just for you.”’

“The Historical Jesus,” published by HarperSanFrancisco, agrees in some ways with another modern look at Jesus--”A Marginal Jew,” by the Rev. John P. Meier of the Catholic University of America, also published last year.

But Meier disputes some of Crossan’s conclusions and calls some of Crossan’s reasoning “a baroque construct.”

Some other scholars find Crossan’s work fascinating, if debatable.

“I see it as set in an ongoing dialogue,” said the Rev. Richard Pervo, professor of New Testament and Patristics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. “I admire Crossan as a scholar in general, a man of good training and a very interesting mind. His point of view is not the only one, but it is defensible.”

“Crossan is very good at setting up speculative proposals, while Father Meier is very good at knocking them down,” Pervo said. “This whole battle is good. It gets people to reorient their minds and examine their prejudices.”

Crossan maintains that his methodology is less ideologically biased than that of some of his competitors. He compares his research techniques to those of modern archeologists, and the first 150 years of Christian tradition to an ancient burial mound.

“It’s very much established now, through a huge consensus of scholarship, that there are three massive layers in that mound,” he said. “Some of it goes back to what happened to Jesus and what was said by Jesus--not necessarily the exact words, but at least the core of an idea.

“For example, Jesus made a startling analogy between the Kingdom of God and a mustard seed. That would stick in somebody’s mind. We also know that Jesus was crucified, but we don’t know the details. That material is the most original, primitive layer.”

The second layer, he says, is the oral tradition dating from the years immediately after Jesus’ death. The third, he says, is the layer of the Gospels, which were composed decades after the events they chronicle.

“This third layer is one of almost complete creativity,” he said. “Let’s say I’m Matthew, and I have to organize my material. I may create a very good story up front that will really get my audience grabbed. I may be highly creative, especially at the beginning and end of my story.”

To identify first-layer material, closest to the time of Jesus, Crossan employs an elaborate system of cross-checking between early Christian documents, as well as documents of Roman and Jewish history.

Finally, he tries to place the material in context by using modern anthropological findings on peasant and Mediterranean societies.

“Without that third dimension, it would be like analyzing Dr. Martin Luther King on just the Washington Mall speech, without the social program, or analyzing Abraham Lincoln just on the basis of the Gettysburg Address,” he said.

As a peasant carpenter, he says, Jesus would have lived near the bottom of ancient Mediterranean society, and his actions and teachings, as well as his associates, would reflect these most humble origins.

“What I see Jesus preaching to the peasants is a social egalitarianism which cuts against both political and religious hierarchies,” Crossan said. “He’s preaching the unmediated presence of God--that nothing whatsoever, or whosoever, separates humans from God.”

“It’s also a sort of a dream of social equality that you find in many peasant societies . . . a dream of what kind of world we would have if the hierarchies were gone, if everything were shared equally.”

Such preaching in Roman-controlled Judea would lead, almost inevitably, to crucifixion, said the Irish-born Crossan.

“It’s social revolution, and a political revolutionary is not nearly as serious as a social revolutionary,” Crossan said. “Social revolution is a danger to society in that you don’t know what will happen. I’ve seen enough of Belfast and Beirut to know that when things come unstuck--even in the best cause in the world--you may not be able to get them stuck together again.”

Crossan sees Jesus’ revolt as extending to family structures. It’s one of the reasons that he concludes that Jesus was unmarried.

“You also must realize that celibacy does not represent an option of luxury, but a necessity of life in the real world of the peasant village,” he said. “There often simply are no women available for men of this class. Then, too, marriage and sexuality don’t seem to be what concerns Jesus most.”

Crossan, 57, a former Roman Catholic priest and member of the Servite order, said his findings have reinforced his Christianity.

Jesus “offers me a challenge that I don’t think I’m up to,” Crossan said. “Social egalitarianism is something that scares the life out of me. The message of Jesus gives me a horizon I will never attain, but at least a horizon keeps you moving.”