The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode
How Does Paul Understand Resurrection?
An Interview with John Dominic Crossan
John Dominic Crossan
Crossan draws on Paul’s life and experience as a devoted Pharisee to understand his insights and expectations for the meaning of resurrection. Unlike the well-known ancient belief in ascension, which was reserved for the near-Godlike humans, Pharisees believed in resurrection for everyone. This was based on a faith in the end time. Paul’s revelation about the resurrection was his realization that Jesus – as Messiah – had begun the general resurrection! He was the first to see Jesus this way.
John Dominic Crossan is an Irish-American biblical scholar with two-year post-doctoral diplomas in exegesis from Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and in archeology from Jerusalem’s École Biblique. In addition to the dozens of books and articles he has written, Dom has been a mendicant friar and a catholic priest, a Co-Chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a President of the Society of Biblical Literature.
In this podcast, we discuss his ideas on Paul’s life as a Pharisee that shaped his views of resurrection and ascension. This is a major theme in Dom’s recent book, Paul as a Pharisee: A Vision of Post Civilization (2024).
Audio
Video
Some Bible and Beyond podcast episodes are made available as video podcasts on our YouTube channel. This month’s episode can be found here.
Interview Transcript
Lightly edited for clarity.
Shirley Paulson
Well, I’m really pleased to have Dom Crossan back with us on Bible and Beyond podcast. You keep coming up with new books and new ideas, so you always have something to talk about Dom, and I’m really glad this time you got me so intrigued with your ideas about the meaning of resurrection and ascension in the Christian context. So before I get into the questions here, I have here, I want to make sure that people know who I’m talking to. I’ve gotten to know John Dominic Crosson best through his books and through our work together with the Westar Institute. In addition to his writing a ton of books on early Christian issues, Dom’s personal life is a wonderful backdrop to his best scholarly contributions. Dom is an Irish American biblical scholar with a two-year postdoctoral diploma in exegesis from Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, and in archeology from Jerusalem’s École Biblique.
He’s been a mendicant friar and a Catholic priest, a co-chair of the Jesus seminar and a president of the Society of Biblical Literature. So the new book that we’re going to be looking at today is that is drawing our attention to these topics is called Paul, the Pharisee: A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization. Did I get that right? Yep. Great. So now let’s start right off with this resurrection question. I think most of us who read the Bible or have had some kind of Christian education have come to think of the resurrection of Jesus as the central act that makes Christianity what it is. It feels as if Jesus was the first and last person ever to experience a resurrection, and that his ascension afterward was proof of his exceptionally divine authority. But in your new book about Paul the Pharisee, you make the point that Paul thought of resurrection differently from other New Testament sources. So maybe let’s start there. Could you give us maybe a sense of Paul’s background as a Pharisee that would give shape to this thought about resurrection? Let’s just go there first.
Dom Crossan
Alright, one fast thought. The way I do anything is not, when I start with resurrection, get into “do I believe it? do I not believe it?” Stop everything and ask what in the first century and the first third of the first century, did anyone before Jesus, or if Jesus never existed, mean by the term resurrection? That’s where I begin, historically in the first century. So for example, we’re imagining Paul, he’s not yet a messianic Christic. I never call him a Christian, but he’s a Christic Messianic, Christic Pharisee. He’s a Pharisee. He’s minding his own business. He hasn’t run into these guys yet. He’s a Pharisee. What does he think about the term resurrection, since it’s central to his faith as a Pharisee? Now, there are two alternatives in the first century, and they really are alternatives—for somebody to be, shall we say, vindicated or justified using a ?? term by God or the gods.
One is ascension, and they are really different. Ascension is personal and individual for a privileged person. It’s not a general thing. It’s a cross-cultural term. Greeks, Romans, Jews acknowledged it. A particular individual who’d done something extraordinary (their definition of extraordinary, you and I might take it), would be taken up to the gods. They wouldn’t just die, or sort of molder. They’d be taken up to the gods. Maybe their body would be burned on a pyre, but their spirits would be taken up to the gods. That’s like the wallpaper in the Mediterranean world. People believed it could happen. Now we might argue about your guy or my candidate, but that it could happen, of course. Moses had been taken up to God according to Josephus and Philo. Romulus must have be taken up to the gods according to Plutarch and the whole bunch. So that’s ascension. I repeat: it’s individual, it’s personal, it’s privilege.
Now, over here is another different world. It’s not the world of cross-cultural and Mediterranean. It’s not even the world of Judaism. It’s the world of sectarian, Jewish Pharisaism, and it has invented—that’s term—at least 150 years before Paul, a whole new concept based on the following question: Is there, or is there not justice in this word?
It’s a basic question. Is the world unjust?
And that’s the world that leads into resurrection then?
Dom Crossan
Yes, that’s the question that leads into resurrection.
Okay!
Because the entire Bible up to about the year 150. I can almost give an exact date. I would say 165 BCE has operated by what’s called Deuteronomic theology. You can read it in good old Deuteronomy chapter 28. It works like this. If you obey the Lord your God, everything will go well. You’ll be fertile and feel and home and victorious. If you disobey the Lord your God, everything will go bad. The whole Bible basically runs in that. That’s the judgment. Now, there are exceptions that say, yeah, it’s not working really well— like Job! But up until about the time of the Maccabean martyrs, that worked. Now the crisis (that’s why we could date it to 165) is how does the Deuteronomic theology work when you’re looking at the battered body of a martyr? Don’t tell me he’s been punished for his sins.
That makes no sense.
Right. Okay.
So for the first time, I think in 165, I would say the ancestors of the Pharisees, as it were, began to say there has to be a judgment after death because it sure ain’t justice operating before death. That may have worked for Daniel in the lions’ den and the kids in the fiery furnace, but it didn’t work for the Maccabean martyrs. So now for the first time, there is going to be resurrection! A new word has been coined, as it were, to explain a whole new concept. A new concept that after—now be very careful. They don’t say, after you die or I die, we will go up before God and be judged and trotted off to heaven or hell. They could have said that. In fact, it would be a good platonic model. Instead they said no, at the end of time, there’s going to be a great big cosmic judgment that everyone will see! Everyone. Everyone who’s ever lived will rise up to be judged by God, and we’ll all see it. We will see the justice of God operationally before our eyes. Now,
Shirley Paulson
And this is resurrection, then.
Dom Crossan
That’s what resurrection meant when it first came out. It was an assertion. If you’re saying, well, that sounds kind of weird, come on! People coming out in the sea, and what if an animal ate you, or a cannibal, or… It’s easy enough to mock, but what these people are desperately asking for, one empire after another has come down getting stronger. Where on earth is the justice of God? And the answer is, well, it is in the future. Now, you’d like to say when?
Of course, that’s why I would ask when. They’re going to say ‘soon.’ Because otherwise, if you told them 2000 years from now and counting, that wouldn’t help. So resurrection is a new concept. I mean, you could say there’s hints of it maybe, but it’s cosmic justice. Now, I want you to think of two options: Ascension is about private privilege. Well, it’s probably public privilege for private people. You’re not going to get it. I’m not going to get it, if I was in the first century. Caesar’s going to get it. Private privilege, cosmic justice. These are the two challenges we’re asked about, and you can quibble about how they said it and how Caesar went up to heaven. You can argue all of that stuff as much as you want, but they’re two mighty powerful metaphors for different visions.
Shirley Paulson
So you’re talking about then the difference between ascending and resurrection. And so resurrection is for everybody. What I want to know is this, is this what Pharisees are thinking or anybody besides Pharisees?
Dom Crossan
No, I mean, we know the Pharisees. That characterizes them, and I go for this. Well, it’s true. You find it in New Testament too. They say the Sadducees don’t believe in the resurrection. The Pharisees do. That seems to be the characteristic. If you go into Josephus, you find the same thing. Josephus is trying to—he’s kind of embarrassed by resurrection, as crudely as I just said it. So he tries to put it in sort of Greeky language. But basically I think what is extraordinary about it is when they first conceived of resurrection—that would be 150 years before the Pharisees, their ancestors. They didn’t say, “Whenever somebody dies, that person (every person, in other words) goes up before God to be judged. They kind of put everyone in sort of a holding pattern.” If I said to Paul or any Pharisee, now wait a minute, wait a minute, I got your idea of this end time, cosmic justice. What happens in between? What happens to all those people that are kind of in a holding pattern, circling, waiting like planes around O’Hare? I think the answer to that is, we don’t have a clue. We haven’t thought of that, because we’re hoping it’s going to happen soon. And as long as we can talk about it happening soon, nobody’s going to say, I want to know what’s going to happen in this 200 or 2000 years. So we can’t press them on that, because I don’t see an answer. Plato did have an answer. Plato was quite willing to say that when you die, you’re going to be judged and go after a happy place or an unhappy place or an in-between place for remedial work. They didn’t do that, because the only way I can explain it is they think cosmically, much more than individually.
Shirley Paulson
The lead is writing to the question about Jesus then, because when he has his resurrection, does that mean everybody got resurrected at the same time he did? Or he didn’t get really resurrected? What’s going on with Jesus?
Dom Crossan
Now we’re getting into real questions. Okay, Paul is a Pharisee. So he’s got this faith as a Pharisee about an end time. However soon you might think of an end time, there is no such thing in the first century as a one-shot resurrection.
Okay
I mean, there is no way Paul—it’s a special privilege just for Jesus—pending. No, that makes no sense. So when you read 1 Corinthians 15, that suddenly starts to make sense. Paul can argue: if there is no general resurrection, that’s the end-time shenanigans, there cannot be a Jesus resurrection.
He never says, well, it’s special for Jesus. No. And then he argues, if there’s no Jesus resurrection, there’s no general resurrection, because—and here’s the great breakthrough, 1 Corinthians 15 (I think it’s verse 20)—Jesus is the first fruits of those who have died. It has begun. This is the great blinding intuition, if you will, of Paul: The general resurrection, which I believed as a Pharisee, if I’m still right as a Pharisee, has begun with the Messiah. So I’m a Pharisaic Messianic Christic (not ‘Christian’ but Christic). Paul pivoted, in a way, on his Pharisaism.
Shirley Paulson
Oh, okay.
Dom Crossan
So he was able to say to himself, as it were, I am right as a Pharisee because of the Messiah. Now we still have to ask a few questions: Why it was the Messiah that would’ve begun the general resurrection? And again, Paul, if you poked him and said, “Okay, Paul, what about the guys who die in between?”—the problem the Thessalonians had with him. What if you die in between? And Paul doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t know what happens in between, and he gets away with it by … it’ll be soon. It’ll be soon. It’ll be soon.
Shirley Paulson
Did Paul’s thought about ascension fit into his understanding of resurrection, or did he just ignore that question?
Dom Crossan
That’s rubbish as far as Paul is concerned. That’s a typical piece of pagan impertinence. Okay, Josephus and Moses, and—excuse me, Philo applied it to Moses. So he probably is not going to fight that, okay? But what we cannot think adequately enough from the West is that it ain’t about individuals! It’s about the world. So if there’s cosmic justice just for individuals, that’s not cosmic justice.
Shirley Paulson
Right? Yeah.
Dom Crossan
So I think his way of thinking of it is, “There has to be, it has to be public, see? What if God takes care of everything and we don’t know about it?” Well, that’s why you got this extraordinary idea of the whole human race. I mean, it’s kind of ridiculous if you poke it a bit from our point of view. But it ain’t funny if you think that means the entire human race is responsible for the world. Oops! Oops! That sounds like the evening news a little bit now.
So that’s why I find Paul powerfully relevant, not because I believe for a second, to be honest with you, in this end time, but I think when I went, as you know, into Eastern iconography and I began to see Jesus resurrecting and taking Adam and Eve out of death, not out of hell, but out of death, I thought, wow, that sounds like Paul to me—that Jesus (and he’s always carrying the cross. So it’s always a crucified one for Paul).
Shirley Paulson
Right? Okay,
Dom Crossan
Let me back up, you see. Here’s what I see as the heart of Paul, the beating heart of Paul. He’s trying to understand, to grasp: God (I’m using his now language), God knew from all eternity, decreed from all eternity maybe, allowed from all eternity—choose your verb—that when the Messiah came, when the Messiah was sent from Paul, down to earth, the greatest empire the world had ever known, that boasted of its law, of its justice, of its peace, of its civilization, would officially and legally execute him.
Paul calls this the mystery of God, the wisdom. What on earth is God up to? That’s when he goes up to that trip up to heaven, and he sees something that nobody else can understand. That’s what he means by the mystery. Why on earth didn’t God send Jesus somewhere nice and safe, or sometime nice and safe, under David? God must have known the mystery, the wisdom of God. That means that the purpose of the execution, for Paul, is God’s revelation of the savage heart‑civilization.
Shirley Paulson
Wow. Okay!
Dom Crossan
That’s breathtaking. When I began to see that’s why Paul can insist that it’s with Jesus, the executed Jesus, precisely the executed Jesus, that God has, as it were, moved up the timetable of resurrection and revealed to us both the savage heart of civilization and the magnificent justice of God as two sides of the one coin.
Shirley Paulson
So now you’re bringing up a really helpful distinction of Paul in his view of this, but that’s different from the other gospels, right? In the New Testament?
Dom Crossan
Paul came in first, let me remember that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were starting in the year 70, and by the time we get to Luke this—so let me imagine we’re in the year fifties, that we don’t know anything else that’s coming. So we don’t know about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We’re in the 50s, so we certainly know about Paul’s letters. So we know what Paul calls “my gospel.” So we know the gospel according to Paul. We may have to dig it out of his letters, but it’s there. I mean, it’s not there in the sense that he beats and beats it, but it’s there in the substratum. It’s like if you went to all of Martin Luther King’s writings, yeah, you know what he’s about. You know what this guy is about.
Okay,
Now, we’re in the 50s. What else is available that we know of in written texts in the 50s, contemporary with Paul and presumably independent of Paul? And that brings up, as you well know, the Gospel according to Q. Good old Q.
Oh dear.
I don’t know. Do all your audience know what that is?
Shirley Paulson
I think you need to explain just a little bit. What is Q?
Dom Crossan
In the last couple of hundred years of gospel scholarship, the massive consensus is that Mark, whom we have, of course, is the major source of Matthew and Luke. So if you have them in parallel columns, you can see what’s called the triple tradition, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And you see Mark going into Matthew and Luke, and it’s fascinating to watch them change. But you also notice somewhere there’s stuff in Matthew and stuff in Luke that ain’t in Mark! There’s another tradition. There’s a double tradition. The German scholars who had discovered it didn’t invent it. It was there to be seen for 2000 years, called it the Source (Quelle) in German. And since German nouns, all German nouns, are capitalized. (I don’t what Germans do in texting. Do they have to capitalize all their nouns? Must drive you crazy!) Anyway, German nouns are capitalized, so it’s The Quelle where the capital Q, so we call it Q.
Shirley Paulson
So Q is then is another source that would’ve been available in the 50s that you’re getting at.
Dom Crossan
It’s in the fifties. That’s the point. It’s before the destruction of Jerusalem. So it’s contemporary with Paul. And here is the extraordinary thing. Q knows about the general resurrection. He knows about it because he mentioned it in passing about the Queen of Sheba arising, or the people of Nina will arise at the general resurrection. It’s called Anastasis Macron, the resurrection, the rising up of the dead. He knows about it, but there’s not a hint anywhere that he applies it to Jesus.
Not a hint. It just ain’t in there, and it’s not in there because, oops, he just forgot that. Oops, I forgot the resurrection. As far as Q is concerned, John the Baptist and Jesus are the witnesses on earth for wisdom, which has come down from heaven to speak. What do we do when wisdom comes down from heaven? We kill them and wisdom goes back to heaven. If you said to Q, now, did Jesus kind of ascend? You can guess the answer, but I don’t see any answer. He certainly thinks of a returning of Jesus, but I don’t think he has any need of either ascension—maybe ascension—but certainly not resurrection. So here’s what we have to understand and face as facts. We have Paul, in which everything is based on the execution and resurrection, which I insist are two sides of the same coin. Paul couldn’t be Paul without it. And here we have a contemporary written text (by the way, I consider it written). There’s too much coincidence to be simply oral tradition.
Shirley Paulson
You’re talking about Q again
Dom Crossan
I’m talking about Q again, and there’s no resurrection in there. So here’s my question.
Okay.
If I can’t find it anywhere before Paul, and even when Paul talks about sources that he has received in the very beginning, say of one Corinthians 15, the early first verses, I’m not sure when he uses the ???, is he talking about ascension or resurrection? I’m clear about it. When he talks about the resurrection of the dead and the resurrection of Jesus, ‘anastasis’ is a clear word. So here’s my question. Let me put it as a blunt statement. I think Paul is the one who invented resurrection for the (let me watch my language) vindication of Jesus. So if I use kind of a neutral term, the vindication of Jesus, God’s deliverance of Jesus, God’s justification of Jesus, whatever time you want, Easter, I think before Paul and without Paul, it would’ve been seen as an ascension.
Shirley Paulson
Okay. All right. That’s helpful.
Dom Crossan
I would even say now, if I’m thinking as a historian, and for example, let’s me imagine this, that everything happened on Easter Sunday morning as it would be later inscribed in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. In other words, let’s imagine there was an empty tomb. Don’t get into the debate on it. And there’s visions. I think ‘visions’ is actually historical, but any Greco-Roman viewer of that would have two explanations immediately: grave robbers have hit the tomb. And then you would ask—because we get this from a contemporary novel in the first century—but if grave robbers hit the tomb, why did they bother with the body? I mean, you take the goodies, but you don’t. . . So grave robbery would be one option. The other one is ascension. That’s exactly what we have in the Carius of Aphrodisia’s novel. His wife is in the tomb. He goes there and she’s not there.
And some people say, yeah, grave robbers buy the body. And then he says, well, maybe she’s been taken up to God, or maybe she was divine all the time! She’s gone back to the gods. So I would expect ascension. I wouldn’t be surprised by it, if they come up with any vindication at all for Jesus. If it’s not, well, he must’ve been wrong; he wasn’t the Messiah. But once you think of Jesus as the Messiah, then you have to face, well, what happened with the execution of the Messiah? Did that disprove he was the Messiah, or did it prove the savagery of civilization?
Shirley Paulson
So do you think that people were thinking of him as a Messiah before he was crucified or did that idea?
Dom Crossan
Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Shirley, for asking that, because I think this whole idea that he was just a nice guy. Let me kind of make a travesty of it: he was a nice guy who went around, told little stories, patted little babies, loved everyone, and told people to be good and love one another, and then boom! He resurrected, and everyone says he’s the Messiah, son of God. I think that big bang theory is rubbish. I don’t think he was called the Messiah because he rose. He rose because he was called the Messiah. So I think during his life, I don’t think Jesus went around and said, I’m the Messiah, I’m the Messiah! He went around talking about God’s rule, because God was much more important to Jesus than himself, which is extraordinary for most of us theologians who imagine somebody more important than ourselves. Jesus talked about God. I think probably in the crowd, somebody probably would be saying, this guy is nuts, but somebody else says, I wonder. I wonder, could it be? Could it be? Well, Isaiah says this about the healing. I don’t see any problem. I cannot prove it that some people wouldn’t say, you want to know who my Son of God is around here? Not this jerk on my coin here that says, Caesar is Son of God. This is what a Son of God looks like to me. . . meaning, of course, the heir of God.
Shirley Paulson
Let’s go a little bit more with that idea of ascension, because you mentioned a while ago that Paul thought of himself as going up somewhere and having his own little experience going up there. Did he think of Jesus needing to ascend too then without, or did the resurrection things stick with him and it precluded ascension for him? Let’s talk a little bit about where the ascension idea went then.
Dom Crossan
Yes, the scene in 2 Corinthians is a typical ecstasy—ek-stasus. You’re standing out of yourself. As he says, I don’t know whether I was in the body or not; a very honest statement, but that’s a heavenly visit. It’s not an ascension in the strict sense of the word. You can call it ascension, if you will, but ascension is usually meaning when the person is dead, they ascend permanently among the gods to immortal life. For the Greeks and the Romans, it’s hard for me to discern whether immortal memory is any different from immortal life. Everyone’s talking about you so well, you’re still alive. In any case, I would keep those as very separate. What happens to Paul you recognize is an ecstasy. He says himself twice, “I don’t know if I’m in the body or out of the body.” But he experiences something. Now he comes back, of course, so that’s not the same thing, but ascension is an end of life privilege for certain very special people.
Shirley Paulson
Do you think then, this was this a Jewish concept that there would be life after death for everybody? Or what’s going on with the life after death ideas?
Dom Crossan
No. In terms of your first question, I think it’s because the title of my book, Paul, the Pharisee. . .
Shirley Paulson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dom Crossan
Precisely because, where does that come from? Where does somebody get this weird idea that Jesus is resurrected …?… from Jesus ascended—that I would say is almost inevitable. Why on earth could you come up with that? I mean, I could imagine a Pharisee saying to Paul, look, you were a Pharisee before you defected, but you know there’s no such thing as a single resurrection.
Shirley Paulson
Okay
Dom Crossan
We talk about saying in ordinary language, we have a senator and we have a Senate. The Senate is the whole group. You can’t have a single Senate. They would say to Paul, and Paul’s going to say, “Well, God has revealed the justice of God, which we thought was only going to be at the end of time, because something so unbelievably bad has happened.
The Messiah has been (let me say it again) publicly and legally executed, not lynched. But legally executed by Roman authority. So either that means, not Rome, but civilization itself, is radically wrong—or Jesus is not the Messiah of course. So what he doesn’t give for that, then I would think, if he’s holding onto his Phariseeism, he cannot accept ascension, because he has to maintain the resurrection. But how can he put the two things together? How is he both a Pharisee—and I’m imagining the Pharisee is when Paul converts, and I’m using the term conversion from being an anti-Messianic Christic to being a pro-Messianic Christic, or from being persecuted to being an apostle. He pivots on the resurrection. This Jesus he’s been hearing about is saying that God’s rule has already arrived. What rubbish? Because if God’s rule has arrived, the resurrection would’ve begun.
But what if the resurrection has begun, Paul? Then these guys could be right! Now, it makes no sense for me that Paul would think of that for Jesus, unless you take the execution. When Paul talks about the mystery of God or the internal wisdom of God, which none of the rulers of this earth knew because they would not crucified, it’s going to reveal the, excuse me, the execution of God revealed the vacuity, hypocrisy, savagery any term you want of civilization itself, not just of Rome, because Rome boasted, not that we’re Roman, but we bring you law and order. We bring you Roman civilization. We won’t bother going over and taking you over the Irish because they’re not civilized, they’re not civilizable. If we don’t take you over, it means you’re not civilizable. So the German forest or the Irish bogs who cares about them, they’re not civilizable. So we are civilization.
Shirley Paulson
So when you bring us into this collective understanding of resurrection, how did Paul envision the rest of us now participating in it? I mean, obviously he wasn’t thinking about us now, because he was then. But he was thinking of everybody. So how do we engage in that then?
Dom Crossan
Well, the closest I can see Paul is, he’s insisting actually that we—at least his own fathers—are supposed to be living resurrected lives. That’s when he can make this in-between moment, which as I’ve said, he doesn’t really know the answer to. If we said to him, it’s going to be 2000 years, Paul, there’s going to be a lot of dead people. Where are they? I suppose—look, if you really poked him, he would say, they will have to wait and show whenever God is ready. But instead he wants to say that, well, right now you should be leading resurrected lives. And then it’s up to God what happens?
It’s up to God what happens. I think it would be logical for Paul, logical for Paul, to say you lead resurrected lives in this world, and when you die, you are part of the resurrection already in process. Now, I don’t see that anywhere, but I think it’s the logic: if it has begun, his metaphor is the first fruit—that’s a metaphor, as you well know from the harvest—well, the harvest isn’t: you start the harvest and then 2000 years later you’ve finished it. The harvest is an ongoing process. So he’s probably trying to tell the poor Corinthians, and no wonder they’re tearing their hair out! The idea is to be leading resurrected lives. Right now. The spirit of the resurrected Lord is supposed to be your spirit, so sort of automatically, you should be doing it. Therefore, Paul would say, when you die, you simply pass into a sort of a different form of resurrected life. Now, I’m pushing here. He never really has to answer these questions.
Right!
The Corinthians are far more local problems and more personal problems about marriage and sex and all sorts of other good stuff. They haven’t got to resurrected lives yet. But I think, for me, the huge relevance of Paul today, and I honestly got glimpse of it when I began to see the iconography of Eastern Christianity and try to think, they always show Jesus with his cruciform halo. So that’s ‘cross,’ and he’s carrying the left. . . In his left hand, he’s carrying a cross, which is really awkward. He’s supposed to be coming out (???) is yanking out of him. And then when he has to do it two-handed, when he has to give somebody the cross, an angel holds the cross and he takes the human race out of death. Now, not out of hell, out of Hades. How does the crucified one save the human race from death?
And then I look at what we’re doing to the world and I see: Yes! Nonviolent resistance as the manifestation of God’s character is the only thing I can see that’ll save us from the violence, which is the normalcy of civilization. The title of the book, when I say: A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization, I mean the violence that is civilization. I don’t mean little part of civilizations happens unfortunately to be violent. I mean that civilization is based, founded and grounded on violence. We tried to cover it up with it. That’s what I mean.
Shirley Paulson
And do you feel that Paul, as a Roman, may have felt that way with his Roman identity also? Or how did he think of the Romans?
Dom Crossan
Well, first of all, we’re moving into Luke, and I haven’t got into Luke because that’s a whole discussion itself.
Yeah, that’s true. Right?
It’s Luke that says that Paul is a Roman citizen. He says it twice. One time he says it when Paul’s put in prison, and Paul doesn’t say he is a Roman citizen until they let him out. And then he makes them apologize. But of course, if he said he was Roman citizen, he wouldn’t be put in prison. So that would spoil the story.
I don’t think he was a Roman citizen. I don’t see a hint of it anywhere in Paul.
I see.
Now he could be, he could be. If his father said he’d been captured and enslaved and then had been freed, and Paul had been born of a freed slave, he could be a Roman citizen. It’s just, I don’t see it anywhere in Paul.
He mentions that he was beaten by rods, which is the Roman punishment. You can always say that some jailer was having a bad day, but I don’t think so. I think this is what Luke needs at the end to explain why Paul is going off to Rome, having been exculpated by everyone in sight, but he’s still going off to Rome—for what? Because he’s appealing to Rome as a citizen. But that, quite frankly, is rubbish. No innocent person was sent to Rome because A) it was too expensive, and B) it would infuriate the Imperial Court. What’s this guy here for? Well, he is innocent. What do you want us to do? Well, we want to super stamp him as innocent. That’s how you become an ex-counselor or an ex-provincial governor really fast.
Shirley Paulson
Okay, right.
Dom Crossan
So the idea of Paul, this is Luke Apologetics in plain language.
Shirley Paulson
Yeah. Okay. Well, that does take us off into another whole new direction.
Dom Crossan
It does. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I went there.
Shirley Paulson
Well, no, I asked you the question, so that’s fair enough. But thank you so much for helping us to really. . . I think the main thing I take away from this whole conversation is why we need to think about resurrection and ascension completely differently, and why the idea of resurrection really does need to be understood in the context of justice and redemption and things that we just probably have never thought of before. So just that very simple concept really helps us to have a whole new concept of Paul and his discussion of the resurrection.
Dom Crossan
Thank you, Shirley. Thank you. Because if you take that one little germ like an atom and start. Try, it’ll blow up and you’ll get everything else. If you just focus on that: ascension, resurrection, what resurrection meant in the first century, what Paul is a Pharisee, it’ll keep expanding because that’s what it did to me. I didn’t get this whole thing. Oh, I see it! … Thank you.
Shirley Paulson
Thank you. This has been fantastic. I knew it would be, but thank you so much for being with us tonight.
Dom Crossan
Always marvelous. Thank you very, very much, and good evening.
Leave A Comment