Crossan Quotes
A Long Way from Tipperary - a MemoirHarperSanFrancisco 2000
The supporters of Jesus said he was born of God without any human father. The opponents shot back immediately with (what else?): "Around here, we call that a bastard!" The supporters of Jesus said that God had raised him from the dead and left an empty tomb behind. The opponents shot back immediately with (what else?): "You guys stole the body and told a lie!" In his Gospel Matthew, for example, knows both those polemical antistories and handles name-calling in return as nastily as anyone else around (read his chapter 24)." p 46-47
Within the standard protocols of Greco-Roman history and biography, it was quite acceptable to create speech-in-character and even action-in-character. Those were words or deeds the epitomized that specific protagonist's general character, speeches or events that articulated exactly what such a person would or should or could have said in such a situation. p 51
They were not called stories but mysteries, and although they were distinguished as, respectively, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, and the Glorious Mysteries, any one was presumably as mysterious as another. Nobody insisted they were literal; nobody suggested they were not. p 132
If the story had been created, and especially when it had, that only pressed the question: What was its purpose, message, meaning? If it was history, that might be explanation enough. If it was parable, the explanation was only beginning. p 133
You have to ask, first if it was intended as fact or fiction, and, if as fiction, what its purpose was -- was it a pure entertainment or a teaching device? ... Was it, for example, a parable, that is, a fictional story with a theological punch, a made-up tale that kicked you in the rear when you weren't looking? I had used the example of misreading Aesop to explain the vacuity of hearing an ancient story as historical when it was never intended as such. ...
My own term for reading a piece of recorded past as history when it was intended as parable is the Aesopic fallacy. p 133-4It was, above all else, the following parallel that showed me how to read that Jesus story as its first writers wanted it to be understood. [Suetonius, writing about Augustus Caesar as 'son of god', prophetically foretold, deified by the Roman Senate, with supernatural portents at his death, etc.] p 139
At this point, I think I finally get it. Both those stories, that of Suetonius and that of Matthew-Luke, are parables, but they are absolutely competing parables, and the second dares to challenge the first one directly and explicitly. p 139
The question comes back to me immediately and inevitably. Undergraduates asked it, and audiences still ask it: "Yes, but are you saying everyone knew they were only parable back then, or that they thought they were history back then, but you think they are parable right now?" I try not to show pain at that slipped-in word only, and I used to answer something like this. Ancient people could hear those stories and not ask that question about literal truth. If they believed them, they were true. If not, not. I do not speak like that anymore. It was a condescending answer because, more and more, I find those ancients just like us and us moderns just like them. In matters of vital importance, moderns and ancient alike acept or reject stories far more on an ideological than an evidentiary basis. We too, Enlightenment or not, ask far too seldom: "Yes, but is that literally true?" ...
Both sides are definite, articulate, and unyielding. Neither side ever mentions a single shred of evidence either way. The story of JFK is true or false depending on the hearer's ideology. It is accepted or rejected as a metaphorical summary and symbolic condensation of one's vision of reality. p 141-2The advantage of not having someone insist, early and explicitly, that one's stories, whether they are biblical or national, are literally fact and inerrantly true, is that you are left free, at least later, to do two things. The first is to recognize ideology, whether it is theirs ("We are only trying to civilize you natives and convert you savages") or ours ("They are only trying to enslave our people and loot our resources"). The second is to distinguish, within an accepted or rejected ideology, when the story is parable and when the story is history. Otherwise, you may become trapped forever, able only to insist on factuality and historicity or, conversely, able only to insist on unfactuality and inhistoricity. It is truly sad when all you can say about Christmas is that there is no Santa Claus. p 146
Maybe ancients were just like moderns, just like us. We all, most of the time, too much of the time, cruise carelessly between fact and fiction, history and parable, and let ideology replace evidence. p 147
We began [with the Enlightenment] to think that ancient peoples ("other" peoples) told dumb, literal stories that we were no smart enough to recognize as such. Not quite. Those ancient people told smart, metaphorical stories that we were now dumb enough to take literally. p 148
"brutalize the Gospel writers" p 163 (interpret them literally)
Both concerns derive from my attempt to understand what certain stories meant to the people who first told them p 163
He talked at length about what had happened years before and how he had felt about the church all those years ever since. He saw now that there might be hope for a church that would never do such things again, that would not demand people believe literally stories that were intended metaphorically, and that would insist on justice inside and outside itself. p 203
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They were not called stories but mysteries, and although they were distinguished as, respectively, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, and the Glorious Mysteries, any one was presumably as mysterious as another. Nobody insisted they were literal; nobody suggested they were not. p 132
If the story had been created, and especially when it had, that only pressed the question: What was its purpose, message, meaning? If it was history, that might be explanation enough. If it was parable, the explanation was only beginning. ... You have to ask, first if it was intended as fact or fiction, and, if as fiction, what its purpose was -- was it a pure entertainment or a teaching device? ... Was it, for example, a parable, that is, a fictional story with a theological punch, a made-up tale that kicked you in the rear when you weren't looking? p 133-4
I had used the example of misreading Aesop to explain the vacuity of hearing an ancient story as historical when it was never intended as such. ... My own term for reading a piece of recorded past as history when it was intended as parable is the Aesopic fallacy. p 133-4
The question comes back to me immediately and inevitably. Undergraduates asked it, and audiences still ask it: "Yes, but are you saying everyone knew they were only parable back then, or that they thought they were history back then, but you think they are parable right now?" I try not to show pain at that slipped-in word only, and I used to answer something like this. Ancient people could hear those stories and not ask that question about literal truth. If they believed them, they were true. If not, not. I do not speak like that anymore. It was a condescending answer because, more and more, I find those ancients just like us and us moderns just like them. In matters of vital importance, moderns and ancient alike acept or reject stories far more on an ideological than an evidentiary basis. We too, Enlightenment or not, ask far too seldom: "Yes, but is that literally true?" ...
Both sides are definite, articulate, and unyielding. Neither side ever mentions a single shred of evidence either way. The story of JFK is true or false depending on the hearer's ideology. It is accepted or rejected as a metaphorical summary and symbolic condensation of one's vision of reality. p 141-2We began [with the Enlightenment] to think that ancient peoples ("other" peoples) told dumb, literal stories that we were no smart enough to recognize as such. Not quite. Those ancient people told smart, metaphorical stories that we were now dumb enough to take literally. p 148
"brutalize the Gospel writers" p 163 (interpret them literally)
Both concerns derive from my attempt to understand what certain stories meant to the people who first told them p 163
He talked at length about what had happened years before and how he had felt about the church all those years ever since. He saw now that there might be hope for a church that would never do such things again, that would not demand people believe literally stories that were intended metaphorically, and that would insist on justice inside and outside itself. p 203