Transcript for John Dominic Crossan On Fresh Air

Jesus and Crucifixion, a Historical View

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This is FRESH AIR. Im Terry Gross.

Easter is coming, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. His
scourging and crucifixion is the focus of the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ.
Were going to take a historical look at crucifixion, which was a widespread form of
punishment in antiquity. My guest, John Dominic Crossan is professor emeritus of
religious studies at DePaul University and author of the books The Birth of Christianity,
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography and Who Killed Jesus. Crossan describes his work
as combining faith and history. Hes a former Roman Catholic monk in the Servite order
and the former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, which investigates ancient historical
evidence to help understand the life and times of Jesus. The seminar is controversial in
part because it does not take the Gospels literally and uses history to reconcile the
different versions of Jesus story as told in the four Gospels of the New Testament. I asked
Crossan how long crucifixion was
used as a form of execution.

Professor JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN (Jesus Seminar): Crucifixion was practiced as a

form of, I would call it, state terrorism for centuries before it became infamous under the
Romans.

GROSS: And who practiced it?

Prof. CROSSAN: Basically, the Carthaginians did it. The Greeks did it. It was one of the
supreme penalties invented in and around the Mediterranean world.

GROSS: Now I was surprised to read in one of your books that there was for a while a
Jewish practice of crucifixion. For what reason?

Prof. CROSSAN: Theres a difference between what I call living crucifixion and dead
crucifixion. In dead crucifixion, the person is put to death. The criminal is put to death by,
say, it could be garroted or strangled, and then literally the body is hung up as a warning,
hung up dead, in other words, and there seems to be a tradition of that in some of the
Jewish sources. The Roman crucifixion was living crucifixion. In other words, the person
was impaled on the cross or on the stake while still alive and allowed to die in that
position.

GROSS: Now who were some of the people that were typically punished with crucifixion?

Prof. CROSSAN: In general, especially in the Roman situation, you can say almost
definitely it was almost synonymous with the slaves execution. It was a warning to other
slaves not to flee, not to commit a crime, not, of course, to kill their master or mistress, and
it was extremely public. Its point was not so much the amount of suffering, though, of
course, it was a horrible suffering, but it was a public warning. Youre literally hung up like
a poster: Dont do what this person did or youll end up as this person did. So very much
for the lower classes and especially for slaves.

GROSS: Now you say that during Roman times, crucifixion was one of three primary ways
of capital punishment. There was crucifixion, being burned alive and getting fed to the
lions.

Prof. CROSSAN: The Romans talked about supremas suprechia(ph), supreme penalties,
and they really didnt calculate them in terms of the amount of suffering. They really
calculated them in terms of annihilation. So being crucified, being fed to the beasts, as it
were, or being burned alive. The function was there would be nothing left to bury. So even
when they were finished with your corpse, the relatives, the loved ones would have
nothing to bury. There would be no tomb where they could mourn, where they could come
to grieve, where they could even, say, eat with the beloved dead. They wished to
annihilate you and to do it publicly.

GROSS: Even with crucifixion?

Prof. CROSSAN: The theory behind crucifixion actually was that you would be left on the
cross until you were consumed by wild beasts or wild animals. Usually crucifixion was low
enough so that the packs of dogs who play in a place like that all the time could consume
your body. It was a form of annihilation. Now we know, for example, that there was one
case in the first century because we have found the heel bone of a crucified person with
the nail still in place and this person was honorably buried. So it is possible, of course. It
depends upon whether maybe you could bribe the guards or have enough influence to get
the body given to you. Then you could get the body back, but in theory, the purpose of
crucifixion was to leave the body there until there was nothing left.

GROSS: Was scourging or whipping usually the first step before crucifixion?

Prof. CROSSAN: In general, scourging preceded crucifixion, and the primary function of
scourging, again, was not simply to create suffering. If the function of suffering was the
poor person would be kept in the barracks and tortured for weeks. The function of
scourging was to reduce resistance. They did not want the person, for example,
staggering through the streets with a crossbar cursing Rome or fighting them all the way.
This was public spectacle. What you wanted was somebody reduced to the state that the
most they could do was stagger, as it were, to crucifixion unresisting. So, yes, usually
scourging would have preceded crucifixion.

GROSS: In your book Who Killed Jesus, you quote a couple of the historic references to
crucifixion, including the Jewish historian Josephus, and let me read a short paragraph
that you quote by him. They were whipped, their bodies were mutilated, and while they
were still alive and breathing, they were crucified while their wives and the sons whom
they had circumcised in spite of the kings wishes were strangled, the children being made
to hang from the necks of their crucified parents. And thats from the book Jewish
Antiquities. Ive never heard this before, that children were also killed while the father was
being crucified and the child was hung by the neck of the father on the cross?
Prof. CROSSAN: I think probably what you have read there is the most horrible
example that we have in the whole of the ghastly literature about crucifixion. That women
were probably crucified I think is absolutely certain. What was done to the children is
probably best not even imagined because the function of crucifixion again is state
terrorism. And when, for example, the legions marched, they did not want to have to come
back for one or two generations. So they made a terrible example of what they were doing,
to deter future resistance.

GROSS: Heres another quote from Josephus from the book Jewish Wars. They were
accordingly scourged and subjected to torture of every description before being killed and
then crucified opposite the walls, 500, or sometimes more, being captured daily. The
soldiers out of rage and hatred amused themselves by nailing their prisoners in different
postures and so great was their number that space could not be found for the crosses nor
crosses for the bodies. Put that in context for us.

Prof. CROSSAN: The context of that is the destruction of Jerusalem, the burning of the
temple by Titus in the year 70 of the common era. And what is happening is either Jews
who are trying to escape from the doomed city or whod been captured after its fall,
Josephus says 500 a day were being crucified until they almost ran out of wood. And one
of the things thats emphasized there is that there is no definite way in which a person
could be crucified. I mean, it wasnt that everyone had to be on a cross and the cross had
to look like this. It could be on a stake, it could be on a tree, it could be anything that
literallyand its a horrible way to put it but this is what they are doingthey are hanging
up a warning as it were on the wall. The mutilated body of a crucified person had become
a poster for dont do this.

GROSS: How does Jesus crucifixion as described in the Gospels compare with
what is known historically about the procedures of crucifixion?

Prof. CROSSAN: In general, the crucifixion itself, and in a way, the Gospel has only one
word, they crucified him. They dont describe the details that would show up, for example,
in a play or a film. You dont have to decide if youre reading the Gospel, Does Jesus
carry only the crossbar, or does he pull a huge cross, an upright, already in position? It
simply says it crucified him. Another thing it does tell you is that the crime as it were, the
alleged claim of being king of the Jews was the sign given that youd always have in a
crucifixion, saying, This is what this person did. So the crime is as it were hung around
his neck or attached to the cross in some way. But everything thats said about the
crucifixion of Jesus would fit quite well into what youd expect in the first century
crucifixion.

GROSS: And it said he was scourged and it said he was mocked.

Prof. CROSSAN: The mocking is probably a separate issue, and in one sense, the
mocking is terribly ironic because hes being mocked as a pseudo-king. And, of course,
any reader of the Christian New Testament, the Christian Gospel, believes profoundly that
he was a king far more than Caesar was or Pilate as a local governor, that their mocking
was profoundest truth. So in a way, the Gospel spends far more timeif you count the
verses. I think theres about four verses on the mocking and theres only one single word
in Greek for the scourging. They wanted to describe the mocking because of the
tremendous irony that the soldiers mocked him as a king. I have no idea whether that is
historical or not. They certainly could have, but the point of insisting on it is the irony that
he was being mocked as a king and, of course, we Christians who are reading this Gospel
believe him most profoundly to be king, not just of the Jews but of the world.

GROSS: When did the cross become a symbol of Christianity?

Prof. CROSSAN: Very, very, very, very slowly and cautiously. In the time before
Constantine, that is, before the beginning of the fourth century when Christianity became
more or less the official religion of the Roman empire, you have very, very many mentions,
of course, from Pauls letters on of the cross of the crucifixion, but you dont see pictures of
it. The very earliest one we have actually of the crucifixion isagain, were back to the
mockinga page in the Palatine Palace in Rome was mocking a fellow page who
apparently was a Christian. His name was Alexandrus(ph). So the page scratches on the
wall of their dormitory as it were a model of the crucifixion in which Jesus is portrayed with
the head of a donkey and written underneath it is: Alexander(ph) Worships His God. And
probably thats the only way it could have been shown as a mocking of the crucifixion until
after the victory of Constantine.

GROSS: Have you thought about if so many people were crucified, if it was such a
common form of execution, why did that become the symbol for Jesus Christ?

Prof. CROSSAN: The crucifix or the cross only became the symbol for Jesus always,
always as accompanied by the resurrection. I mean, this is two things: execution and
resurrectiondeath, resurrection. Always the two things because, of course, the point is
that Jesus was officially, legally, publicly executed by Rome. It wasnt that Pilate made a
mistake or that Pilate simply was rounding up people and he grabbed Jesus by mistake.
Jesus was executed by the normal sea of the civilization of his day. Then, of course, when
you say that God raised Jesus from the dead, youve got two things on a collision course:
Rome crucified Jesus; God raised Jesus. Then the inference is very clear. This God were
talking about is on a collision course with Rome because God, as it were, countermanded
the official decree of Rome. And so if you take away the resurrection, then the crucifixion
becomes almost meaningless or you have to get into another theology in which the
crucifixion is the center of Christianity all by itself.

GROSS: When you, as someone who studies the historical Jesus, think about the
resurrection, do you think about it as metaphor or as actuality?

Prof. CROSSAN: I think of itI would not make the distinction of metaphor or actuality. I
would make the distinction of metaphor are literal because metaphors can be very actual.
For example, the metaphor for me is that to claim resurrection for Jesusand I can leave
it completely whether you take it metaphorically or literally, either way, what you are
claiming is that something has happened here which is going to change the way the world
sees everything and I think that is right because the claim youre making is that God has
reversed the normalcy of civilization. And thats why its very important for me to insist that
Pilate from his point of view got it right. He looked at Jesus. He said, This person resists
our law and order, as it were. Not a violent resistor or Id have rounded up all his followers
like I rounded up Peravisus(ph), but, yes, he resists us and, therefore, he must be publicly
executed.
Now to say that God has reversed that decision puts God on a collision course with the
normalcy of civilization. That I believe is actual cause I believe in what happened at the
death of Jesus is that we were confronted with a warning that violence is going to destroy
us. We got a warning that if you do not resist evil non-violently, violence will destroy us. I
think something did happen because that was a warning and we have not been heeding it
for 2,000 years.

GROSS: My guest is John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at

DePaul University and former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar. Well talk more after a break.
This is FRESH AIR.

FUND DRIVE

GROSS: My guest is John Dominic Crossan, former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar
which uses ancient history to understand the life and times of Jesus. When we left off, we
were talking about his interpretation of the resurrection.

With the resurrection, do you think that there was some kind of physical transformation
that happened to the actual body of Jesus?

Prof. CROSSAN: No, I dont. I am completely convinced that Jesus had told people before
his death that the kingdom of God has already arrived and that we have begun to
participate with God in what Im going to call the great cleanup. The fancy word for that is
eschatological consummation, the great cleanup of the world, the attempt to make it a just
place. I am absolutely certain also, historically, Im speaking, that people had visions of
Jesus after his execution. They had visions and theyre not hallucinations. They are
visions. They are apparitions of Jesus. When they put those two things together, they said
then, Jesus has risen as the beginning of the general resurrection. Thats the only thing
the word could have meant to them. Its not a personal private privilege for Jesus. He has
risen as the head of those who have died before him and as the promise of those who will
die after him.

I take that metaphorically. I do not take it actually. I do not think all around Jerusalem on
Easter Sunday morning there were hundreds of empty tombs and I dont think the people
who believed in the harrowing of hell ever suggested, Lets go out and check the tombs of
the prophets to see if theyre gone. I think they knew quite well what they were saying.
They were saying something which they took metaphorically and which we take literally
and I think weve kind of lost the actuality.

GROSS: Now something that I find a little confusing. When we were talking a little earlier
about crucifixion, you were explaining that for most Roman crucifixions the dead body was
left on the cross to be eaten by the birds of prey and by the wild dogs, and part of that was
punishment for the family. The family would not be given the remains to be buried. Thered
be no tomb, thered be no remains. But the remains of Jesus is such a fundamental part of
the Christ story. Do you think an exception was made for him, that there were remains,
that there was a body?
Prof. CROSSAN: Its utterly possible because of thePhilo, for example, does mention
the possibility of a body being given back to the family. And in a way, its not so much a
punishment for the family as a punishment for the person because theyre being
annihilated. And we have the crucified heel bone of somebody who is honorably buried.
So it is utterly possible that in exceptional cases, either because you bribed the guards or
because you were able to get some influence, it was utterly possible to get the body and
give the body normal burial.

Now the problem is that the Jewish law of Deuteronomy says by nightfall the body must be
off the cross. I have no evidence, and I would expect that the Romans did not follow
Jewish law cause the purpose of crucifixion was to let you die in agony on the cross, and
if the personlets imagine a case in which the person was only crucified by late in the
afternoon, they would not be taken down from the cross. So the question is, and this is the
question: Is the story of Joseph of Arimathea in Matthew, Mark and Luke or of Joseph of
Arimathea and Nicodemus in John, is that an historical record of what happened, or is that
Christians best hope of what they hope might have happened without knowing what had
happened to the body of Jesus?

GROSS: So you think that the Gospels might be more about that hope than the reality,
more about hope than journalism.

Prof. CROSSAN: Here is the problem. When you look at Mark, Matthew, Luke and John,
the story of the burial of Jesus, knowing that Mark is the basis for Matthew and Luke and
that possibly, this is debated in scholarship, they may be the source for John. You watch
the body. The body burial gets steadily better. Its a hasty, hurried burial in Mark. By the
time Matthew and Luke read Mark and develop the story, its burial in a tomb in which
nobody else has been laid and theyre explaining to you why Joseph of Arimathea was
able to be a counselor for Jesus but not against him on Thursday night as it were. The
story is developing. By the time you get to Johns account, the burial of Jesus isI
wouldnt even say royal. Its transcendental. There are so much spices used it would fill
almost the entire tomb. Its a magnificent burial. Its the burial of the son of God when you
get to John.

You know, what happens is as a historian, when I retroject that trajectory of a burial getting
better and better and better and I ask what was there in the beginning, it doesnt look very
good. It looks to me all they might have had at the very beginning is a hope that maybe
some pious non-Christian Jew out of respect for the law of Deuteronomy would have
buried Jesus body, but that immediately then raises the issue that they see, Well,
wouldnt he have also buried the two robbers who were crucified with Jesus. Now wouldnt
there be at least three in the tomb and would it be a public tomb for criminals and then
how would we know which was Jesus body. And so you can see them, I think, grappling
with the difficulties of a story which I dont think is historical. I think it is their fervent hope,
their best hope that somebody took care of the body of Jesus, but none of that, by the
way, in any way, is for or against resurrection because resurrection is a new creation by
God.

GROSS: Religion scholar John Dominic Crossan. Well be back in the second half of the
show.
Im Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, we continue our conversation with John Dominic Crossan, religion
scholar and former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar. Well hear his thoughts on the film The
Passion of the Christ and hear why Crossan is no longer a monk.

This is FRESH AIR. Im Terry Gross, back with John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus
of religious studies at DePaul University. He describes his work as combining faith and
history. Hes a former monk in the Servite order and the former co-chair of the Jesus
Seminar, which turns to ancient history to understand the life and times of Jesus. The
Jesus Seminar has been controversial because it focuses on history and doesnt accept
the Gospels as literal truth. Crossans books include The Birth of Christianity and Who
Killed Jesus.

I know that youve seen Mel Gibsons movie, The Passion of the Christ, and Im
wondering if you could give us your short review of how the Jesus story is told in the
movie.

Prof. CROSSAN: Ive seen it twice, a month apart. I saw it at the end of January and,
again, at the end of February. So I had a good month into think about it. Basically,
theres a couple of things that any passion story or any passion drama does. You take the
four Gospels, and there are four of them, by the way, and you reduce them to one. And
then you reduce that one Gospel to simply execution and then you reduce that execution
to passion, the Latin word for passion, andmeaning suffering. So everything coalesces
on the suffering of Jesus.

Therefore, for example, there is nothing in Mel Gibsons movie except brief flashbacks,
more to increase the poignancy, about the life of Jesus, so by the time you come to the
execution, and the resurrection, of course, is even more fleeting in this movie, you have no
idea why anyone, anyone at all, would want this person dead, let alone executed publicly.
You dont even understand it. Nor do you understand why, for example, it begins with a
nighttime arrest of Jesus, accompanied by Judas, who betrays him. Why was that
necessary? Couldnt the authorities have grabbed him anytime they wanted?

Well, if youve been reading the story from Palm Sunday onSunday, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, as we would say, of that weekthe crowd is all on the side of Jesus. Its said
again and again and again. In the Gospel, the high priestly authorities are afraid to move
because the crowd around the side of Jesus. And in Mark 14:1-to-2 they give up. They
finally say, Well, we cant do it during the festival. Therell be a riot. Then comes Judas.
And Judas says, I can arrange it. I can arrange that youll get him apart from the crowd at
night.

So what is not in this movie at all is that the whole Jewish crowd in Jerusalem is so much
on the side of Jesus that it requires this nighttime arrest and an apostolic traitor to get him.
And theres none of that in this movie. All the Jews that are in this movie, except for what
Im going to call Christian Jews, are people like Simon of Cyrene, who are converted into
Christiansall the non-Christian Jews are bad. They simply are. And it doesnt work to
say everyone is a Jew. Because its quite clear, for example, that Simon of Cyrene
becomes a good Jew when he becomes a Christian.

GROSS: When did passion plays become popular? When did it become popular to focus
stories on the suffering, the crucifixion and suffering, of Christ?

Prof. CROSSAN: The emphasis on the suffering of Christ, almost to the exclusion of
everything else, is really very much a medieval idea and may well reflect the experiences
of people. If people are suffering, and I mean seriously suffering, say with plague or
something like that, or invasion, then to think of the sufferings of Jesus is extremely
consoling. And the script that Mel Gibson used from the dolorous passion of our Lord
Jesus Christ according to the meditations of Ann Catherine Emmerich is a good example.
She had a life of suffering. She had a life of hardship, Augustinian nun who spent the last
10 years of her life bedridden, in great pain. And no wonder, of course, that she had an
almost mystical union with the sufferings of Jesus. Of course, she herself was in intense
suffering. So the emphasis on suffering isHow shall I say it?--appropriate, maybe?
Maybe even necessary for people in intolerable pain. Outside that, it becomes
dangerously close to pathological.

GROSS: What do you mean by pathological?

Prof. CROSSAN: I mean, when you start to focus on suffering and the whole meaning of,
say, Jesus life being reduced, and that word was carefully chosenreduced to suffering,
it is not the way anyone thought about it in the 1 st century. The Romans did not compute
suffering. They didnt say we have to make this person suffer as much as possible or they
would have kept him in the barracks and tortured him for weeks on end. Their purpose
was not suffering, but public warning. So when you bring it all down to suffering, its very
hard to show it without sadism. And thats what happens in this movie. How can you show
two hours of unrelenting brutality and ask people to watch it and ask people to feel that
they want it to happen because its their redemption?

So you have to be, as it were, on the side of the Roman soldiers. You have towant it. You
cant even agree with that Jewish woman who cries out in the crowds Somebody stop
this! You cant. You are being co-opted into collusion with sadism. And I think there is no
evidence that I know of that the soldiers who scourged Jesus were sadistic brutes, as
theyre shown in the movie. They could have just been executioners doing their dirty job,
wanted to get it over, and get back to the barracks. So when you emphasize suffering to
that extent, it is almost impossible not to slip over into sadism or even into religious
pornography.

GROSS: Now when you say that the Romans were uninterested in sadism and suffering,
they just wanted to set a public example, but isnt the whole point of the public example
that you dont want to be the victim of sadists and you dont want to suffer, so its it finally
really about sadism and suffering?

Prof. CROSSAN: Its a very delicate line; I agree with you. But did a person who was
scourged and crucified suffer? Of course. But, for example, by insisting on the public, the
public nature of it, they were insisting on their priorities. Their priority was not to make the
person suffer. Their priority was to make a public example of this person. For example, if
they scourged the person and the person died, they have failed. They have failed in their
purpose, if the person simply died over the scourging. Thats not their purpose. If the
person died on the way to crucifixion, they failed again. They have to get the person to the
cross to die on the cross. That is their purpose. So of course there is suffering.

GROSS: My guest is John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at

DePaul University and former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar. Well talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC

GROSS: My guest is John Dominic Crossan, former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar which
interprets ancient history to help understand the life and times of Jesus. Crossans books
include The Birth of Christianity and Who Killed Jesus.

Let me ask you about one of the key figures in the story of Jesus and that is Pontius
Pilate.

Prof. CROSSAN: OK.

GROSS: What was his actual position in the Roman empire?

Prof. CROSSAN: Pontius Pilate was what could best be described as a sub-governor. He
was the governor of the southern part of the Jewish homeland of Judaea, Samaria and
Idumaea. And Herod Antipas was running Galilee. But he washe, Pilate, was under the
governor, lets call him a first-level governor of Syria, who could hire em and fire em as it
were. Well, maybe couldnt hire em but he could certainly fire em, because he did. So
hes a very ambiguous character. He is not really the full governor. Hes a kind of a sub-
governor, certainly.

He was in for 10 years and most governors were in only for two years. He probably didnt
like his job. He probably was fed up and tired. And 10 years is a long time even though
lets see, he came in 26 so the crucifixion was probably only four years into his tenure. The
other thing he had to deal with was he was dealing with a temple state, as it were. He
would be used to dealing with aristocrats like himself in any other part of the empire but
here he had to deal with high priests and he could, in this case, and fire, that high priest.

So its a very bad administrative situation if the person that you must negotiate with, in
charge of the indigenous people that youre governing, you can fire that person. How do
you negotiate with somebody who can fire you? So theres lots of problems with Pilate
simply from an administrative point of view before we get to his character or anything else.

GROSS: What do you know about his character?

Prof. CROSSAN: Of all the governors, or all the sub-governors, if you will, of the Jewish
homeland in the 1st century, we know more about Pilate probably than anyone else. Some
of the other ones, we only know their names. But we know from the Jewish historian
Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo a lot about Pilate. And whats really ironic is
that precisely what they insist onfrom Philo, for example, his gratuitous cruelty and his
tendency to put people to death without proper trial, and, from Josephus, his brutal way
with handling even unarmed crowdsexactly what they focus on show us a Pilate who is
the exact opposite of the sort of a just person doing his level best to free an innocent
person, and just forced by this shouting crowd to go along with the Crucifixion against his
best will and just kind of finally giving in. Maybe a little weak but, you know, trying to
prevent a riot. Thats exactly almost the precise opposite of what Philo and Josephus tell
us about him.

GROSS: Who were the Jewish priests in the time of Jesus who called for the execution of
Jesus? Who was this class of people?

Prof. CROSSAN: The high priests were certain aristocratic families, basically about four
predominant ones, from whom the high priest was appointed, and appointed by the
Roman authorities, by the way, not by any sort of election of their own people, during the
1st century. So, for example, the most important house or family was the House of Annas
because they had about eight high priests in about 60 years, so theyre almost the
dominant one. Caiaphas, for example, the high priest at the time of Jesus execution, was
the son-in-law of Annas, who had been high priest before him. And Caiaphas was in for
almost 17 years. So the high priest would represent, as far as the Romans were
concerned, at least the leadership of the Jewish people, and they had to negotiate with the
Romans as best they could because they were really under the Romans.

GROSS: And is there any historical information about how the Jewish common people felt
about the priestly class?

Prof. CROSSAN: Its very, very interesting that in Marks Gospel, just to take that for an
example, consistently on what we call Palm Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of
that Holy Week, its said repeatedly, every day, in fact, that the people of Jerusalem,
presumably, are so much on the side of Jesus that the high priestly authority who consider
him dangerous and who consider that he might bring the Romans down on them like a ton
of marble as it were, that they are against him but they cannot move against him because
the crowd is supporting him so much. And, in fact, in Mark 14:1 to 2, the high priestly
authority finally say, We give up. We cant do it during the festival. There might be a riot in
support of Jesus. So that, of course, is the reason why it becomes necessary to have a
Judas who will locate Jesus at night, who will locate Jesus apart from the supporting
crowd, and whom the high priestly authorities then can get under their control.

GROSS: Historically is there any evidence that the Jewish priests called for the execution
of Jesus, and, if there is evidence of that, what are some of the historical explanations for
it?

Prof. CROSSAN: The Jewish historian Josephus sums up what happened to Jesus by
saying that the first man among us, that would be the leaders, accused him before Pilate
and Pilate crucified him. And I think that is the most precise and accurate summary you
can give to the question, Who killed Jesus? The high priestly aristocracy and the Roman
leadership both agreed that Jesus was dangerous, and I think they both agreed he was
not a violent revolutionary or they would have rounded up all his followers. They agreed
that he was, however, what we might call a non-violent resister against Roman law and
order, and its not at all necessary to demonize somebody like Caiaphas nor to canonize
somebody like Pilate. It made good administrative sense from the Roman point of view
that Jesus couldcouldunwittingly, maybestart a rebellion. He was talking about the
kingdom of God, and as far as Rome was concerned, that was Rome. So Caiaphas and
Pilate could have agreed without any problem that Jesus was a danger. But all the
evidence is that the people were not on the side of Caiaphas.

GROSS: So when you look at the question, you know, were the Jews responsible for the
execution of Jesus, how do you answer that?

Prof. CROSSAN: The statement that Jews were responsible for Jesus is an irresponsible
statement. Some Jewssome Jewsopposed Jesus. We know, for example, that the
high priestly authority under Caiaphas opposed Jesus. We also know that the crowd
thats the word that Mark uses consistently in the days before the execution of Jesus
was on his side to the point of opposing their own high priestly authorities. That has to be
shown in any story thats even accurate to the Gospels; Im not even talking about
historical accuracy behind the Gospels. If you want to tell the Gospel story, you have to
show that the crowd in Jerusalem on the days preceding Sunday, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday are so much in favor of Jesus and so much in support of Jesus that the high
priestly authorities almost give up, and it takes Judas, really, to give them the solution.

GROSS: You were a monk for several years.

Prof. CROSSAN: Right.

GROSS: How many?

Prof. CROSSAN: I was a monk for 19 years in a 13 th century Roman Catholic order called
the Servites.

GROSS: Then you left the order and became a scholar eventually of the historical Jesus.
Is there any way of telling us, briefly, why you left the order and then turned to
scholarship?

Prof. CROSSAN: I left the order for two reasons. One was to get married, and that was
quite adequate reason all by itself. And the other one, even if I could have stayed and got
married, is that I was in constant trouble with the religious superiors, the Cardon
archbishop(ph) of Chicago, because Id been magnificently trained by my order to think.
And as soon as I proceeded to do it, some of the concussions I came to were not
acceptable. And, unfortunately, Ive been trained to think and not to think under control, so
there was a constant tension by my religious superiors in the Archdiocese of Chicago, not
with the order.

GROSS: Can you give us an example of something that youa conclusion that you
arrived at or a question that you kept thinking about because you were thinking
independently that was criticized within your order?

Prof. CROSSAN: Well, in one sense, the final one was in 1968. When the papal
encyclical condemning birth control was issued, I was invited to be on nationalpublic
television, in this case, in Chicago. And I said, basically, that I thought the pope was wrong
on this one. But as far as I was concerned, he was still the pope, in much the same way I
thought the president was wrong about Vietnam, but he was still the president. And
somehow or other that did not seem to go down too well. But it was the truth. Thats the
way I felt. The pope was the pope but wrong. The president was the president but wrong.
And that, more or less, brought down the Cardon archbishop of Chicago, not my order, by
the way. Ill say that again. But the Cardon archbishop of Chicago asked my religious
superior to show cause why I should not be tossed out of the diocese within one week.

GROSS: So you left the order under pressure.

Prof. CROSSAN: Right.

GROSS: But you stayed within religion. I dont know if you continued to practice it in the
same way, but you certainly became a scholar of the religion. Did you want to keep
practicing after that, or were you so disturbed by how you were treated that you wanted to
just be a scholar and not a practicing Christian?

Prof. CROSSAN: Oh, no, not at all, not at all. And I should insist I do not consider at all
that I was treated badly. There was lots of other people suffered far more because they
wanted to remain a priest and had to leave, say, to get married. I already made my
decision that I wanted to leave the priesthood, even if I could get married and stay a
priest...

GROSS: Right.

Prof. CROSSAN: ...because of the constant tension about theology. So I did not really
have the trauma that some people did. And what I wanted to do was exactly what I did. I
wanted to go to a Roman Catholic university, and I went to, if I may say so, a very great
one, DePaul University in Chicago. Stayed there for 26 years, never even considered
moving; told anyone that I had no intention of moving. I loved it. And part of it was it was
the Roman Catholic atmosphere, but it was the Roman Catholic atmosphere which I could
think freely.

GROSS: John Dominic Crossan, thank you so much for talking with us.

Prof. CROSSAN: Its been a pleasure, as always, Terry,

GROSS: John Dominic Crossan is professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul

University and former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar. His books include Who Killed Jesus
and The Birth of Christianity.

This is FRESH AIR.