I usually don't do Lent, really, though I've occasionally refrained from something easy and tuned into
Lent Madness for a few years. But this year I've happily fallen into a
series of "visual lectures" by venerable historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan and discussions with preachers in conversation with his work, all hosted by Tripp Fuller, genial host of the intoxicating
Homebrewed Christianity podcast. Crossan started us off last week with a powerful preamble on the ubiquitous temptations of antisemitism baked into Christian history,
a topic whose urgency he came to while watching the Passionsspiel in Oberammergau in 1960. (One of the slides.) This week we hit the road with the first of four lectures on the "evolutionary challenge" of Jesus, something only graspable if we can understand the "matrix" in which he and the biblical writers were operating. Today he confronted us with the fact that almost all the honorofics used by Christians for Jesus were already current in his time as terms for Caesar Augustus. What did that mean at the time, and what might it mean for us now?
Without knowing Jesus' inversion of "imperial Roman theology" we might replicate it. The live discussion was with Brian Zahnd, who leads a non-denominational church in Missouri. He hails from the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, and uses Crossan's ideas about the countercultural vision of Jesus' nonviolent path to peace through justice in his preaching and writing (though an editor once asked him if might quote someone else). He uses it in particular in preaching against Christian nationalism. "America is not the biblical Israel," he told us he says, "it's the biblical Babylon." Good stuff!
