Sublime

this general thrust, of a very Jewish Jesus who was nevertheless opposed to some high-profile features of first-century Judaism, seems to me the most viable one if we are to do justice, not just to the evidence of the synoptic gospels (they, after all, are easy game for any critic who wants to avoid their implications) but more particularly to the

The second explains the controversies, though not the crucifixion, at the expense of most of the evidence about first-century Jews. At the historical level, nobody doubts that Jesus was crucified, but a good many doubt that he entered into controversy with the Pharisees in particular. How are we to proceed?

The Seminar announced to its public that the real Jesus was innocent of the wicked apocalypticism with which so many Christians, not least in the conservative American churches against which American academics react so strongly, had for so long associated him.

My anxiety, rather, is this: in grasping the way in which Jesus’ programme cut against the normal social expectations of Mediterranean peasant culture, Crossan, like Mack (though not so blatantly), has radically and consistently underplayed the specifically Jewish dimension both of the culture itself and of Jesus’ agenda for it.

At the same time it would clearly both challenge some prevailing assumptions within that Jewish context and retain a special focus which would be characteristic only of Jesus’ career, not of the work of his post-Easter followers. It must be set within Judaism, but as a challenge; it must be the presupposition for the church, but not the blueprint.

To take a step back once more, when people write about “atonement theology,” the tendency has been to go to Paul and Hebrews and to come to the gospels only for those detached phrases that will support (or so it seems) the kind of “theological” construct that has already been culled from Paul.