\u00a0The gospels are, in large part, a work of pious fiction according to Crossan. The Resurrection never occurred. It\u2019s just a comforting tale early believers came up with to deal with the loss of Christ. The portrayal of Jesus as born at Bethlehem is something the gospel writers have to concoct in order to identify Jesus with the Messiah. And so, to get him there, Luke tells the story\u2013of a worldwide taxation enrollment.<\/p>\n
I drum my fingers on the table top and reminisce. Comedian Steve Martin used to do a routine in which he smiled broadly with that distinct smile of his and said, \u201cRemember a couple of years back when the earth (wry pause)\u2026\u00a0exploded<\/i>? Remember how they built that giant space ark and loaded all of humanity into it, but the government decided not to tell the stupid people what was going on so that they wouldn\u2019t panic\u2026..\u201d The light of understanding would then break across his face as he surveyed the faces of the audience and he would quickly backtrack saying, \u201cOooooooh! Uh\u2026.. Never mind!\u201d<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t help but think of that as I read Crossan\u2019s take on Luke. We are being asked to believe that the gospels are works of cunning fiction by people laboring under some huge need to bring others under the spell of their delusion of a Risen Christ. Part of their messianic delusion requires them to link the Nazarene carpenter with King David by portraying him as born in \u201cthe city of David\u201d, Bethlehem. And so they do what to get Jesus there in time for his birth and debut as the Son of David?<\/p>\n
Well, a lot of options are open to the creative gospel writer whose only goal is to write a tall tale. You could just say that Mary\u2019s grandmother took sick and she went to visit her. You could claim that Joseph bought a plot of land and didn\u2019t want to leave Mary behind while he went to inspect it. You could cook up an angelic visitation commanding the Holy Family to go to Bethlehem and wait for their son to be born. Any of these stories have the tremendous advantage of being extremely hard to refute decades after the event. And since you\u2019ve already stuffed your gospel full of miracles, what\u2019s one more angel?<\/p>\n
But no, according to Crossan, Luke tells the equivalent of Martin\u2019s space ark story: \u201cRemember, a few decades back when the\u00a0entire world was enrolled for taxation<\/i>?\u201d He invites, not just somebody to refute it, but\u00a0everybody<\/i>\u00a0in his entire audience. That\u2019s an awfully strange thing to do if the enrollment never happened and an awfully odd way to establish the bona fides of your main character.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But, more than anything, what strikes me about the gospels is precisely what\u00a0Gracq says.\u00a0 Occam\u2019s Razor says that the simplest explanation for the Jesus we meet in the gospels is that there was a real Jesus who is the source of the sayings and stories of the gospels, rather than that four evangelists all invented such a character.<\/p>\n
Yeah, yeah.\u00a0 I know.\u00a0 Marcan priority.\u00a0 Luke and Matthew are just copying Mark.\u00a0 Except, of course, they aren\u2019t \u201cjust\u201d copying Mark.\u00a0 They certainly seem to have him as a source (you know, like writers do when they are writing their own stuff).\u00a0 But they also appear to have lots of other sources as well.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because not just four evangelists but a whole community of people are remembering a real man named Jesus, to whose life they are \u201ceyewitnesses and ministers of the word\u201d as Luke calls them.\u00a0 In short, the gospel are memoirs of a community of eyewitnesses and bear all the earmarks we would expect if that were so:<\/p>\n