Crossan and the resurrection of Jesus : rethinking presuppositions, methods and models

Abstract

When historical Jesus’ scholar, John Dominic Crossan, stated that Jesus’ resurrection appearances were apparitions and not physical appearances, was it possible to test this conclusion? To what degree are a scholar’s conclusions affected by his presuppositions? Crossan’s definition of history was that it ‘is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse’ (Crossan 1999:3). The outworking of this view was that the New Testament Gospels are regarded as megaparables, fictitious creations. His application of this view was, ‘Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens’ (Crossan 2012:5). A pattern emerged in which Crossan stated that he was using a method of postmodern interactivism (Crossan 1998a:42). But how is this discerned and articulated with as objective a methodology as possible? What do presuppositions of postmodern, reconstructive, interactivism do to Crossan’s conclusions regarding Jesus’ resurrection appearances? Here the parameters were restricted to literary and historical dimensions of Crossan’s speech acts. The problem investigated was to seek to identify Crossan’s presuppositions and methods in his study of the resurrection of Jesus to determine if they were valid or not when the Gospel evidence on the resurrection was considered. A presupposition-hypothesis method was used to test for verification or falsification, using a critical realist epistemology. A research gap indicated a need for a more objective model to isolate a researcher’s presuppositions of Jesus’ resurrection. The Beaver and Geurts framework (2011) was chosen that led to probability and not certainty about the content of presuppositions. Presuppositional ‘triggers’ were identified from Crossan’s resurrection data. The hypothesis tested was: J D Crossan's presuppositions and methods, in his study of the resurrection of Jesus, are not valid when the Gospel evidence on the resurrection is taken into consideration. Twenty-three presuppositions were discovered and these were developed into 18 hypotheses, three of which were tested: Hypothesis 9: The divine manifestation of Christianity for a postmodern world is deconstruction (his term is reconstruction) and it is not done once for all, but is reinterpreted for each generation’s issues. It was found that reconstruction mutilates the voice of the author by imposing an a priori metaphorical dogmatism on the text. Crossan’s postmodern, reconstructive, interactive hermeneutic was shipwrecked on the ‘rocks’ of contradiction, inconsistency and a self-defeating methodology. Hypothesis 10: The New Testament resurrection narratives are not historical documents. Crossan defined history as a postmodern reconstructionist and reached postmodern, reconstructive conclusions, thus using a question begging logical fallacy. He also did not apply this methodology consistently. Hypothesis 12: It does not matter what a person believes about whether Jesus’ tomb was empty or not; the importance is its meaning, which is independent of factuality. Crossan imposed his own understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection through his use of free play, relativistic, multivalent, postmodern, nonsupernatural stratagem on the text. Thus, Crossan’s idiosyncratic meanings replaced objective, hermeneutical testing of the text of Scripture. Therefore this dissertation’s hypothesis was verified.