Excerpt: EXEGESIS, LAMENT, AND BIOGRAPHY p 572-3, The Birth of Christianity - Discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus, John Dominic Crossan, HarperSanFrancisco, 1998.

Finally, the one positive story is the women's vision of Jesus in Matthew. Matthew 28:9-10 was created to reverse the ending of the empty tomb in 28:1-8, which he copied from Mark 16:1-8, and to prepare for the eleven disciples’ vision ofJesus, which he created in 28:16-20. That vision is positive, but, as mentioned before, it is a message-vision rather than a mandate-vision; it is secretarial-level rather than executive-level apparition. All of that especially in Mark and John, is not a case of ancient tradition being redacted negatively but a case of negative tradition being created before our eyes. Why do it?
I
II now bring all those preceding problems together and offer a single solution. In the passion-resurrection tradition, women appear more frequently but also more negatively in texts at and after the execution ofJesus. Why is that? In the passion-resurrection tradition, those who created prophetic exegesis are not those who created biographical story. Who are they? In the passion-resurrection tradition, there are no accounts of female llament or ritual mourning for Jesus. Why is that? My simultaneous answer to those three questions is that ritual lament is what changed prophetic exegesis into biographical story.

The Life Tradition, the tradition of how Jesus lived, predominated among the hamlets and small towns of Galilee and Syria. The Death Tradition is associated primarily with Jerusalem, a city linked very early, even before Paul, with other Cities such as Damascus and Antioch. But from the Common Sayings Tradition, through the Q Gospel and the Gospel of Thomas, into the Didache, the Life Tradition shows no evidence of knowing any passion-resurrection story. The biblical pattern of persecution-vindication is fundamental for the Life Tradition, and that tradition is every bit as mythological, eschatological, and theological as is the Death Tradition. But even more striking than the absence of sayings collections in the Death Tradition is the absence of passion-resurrection narrative in the Life Tradition. The reason for that absence is that the narrative was created at one time in one place. It was composed in Jerusalem, where the female and male companions of Jesus whose names we know stayed from the very beginning. That was where Jesus had been crucified and that was where God would act to vindicate Jesus. They stayed in Jerusalem because that was where they expected the imminent apocalyptic consummation to take place.
II imagine in that Jerusatem community two equiprimordial processes, exegesis and lament, engendered respectively by male and female members. In the absence of a body and a tomb, female ritual lament wove exegetical fragments into a sequential story. I do not find any evidence that multiple oral performances of such a passion-resurrection story are represented by any set of our extant gospels. What we have there in my best reconstruction is but a single line of scribal tradition, from the Cross Gospel into and through the canonical gospels.
If such oral multiforms existed and were eventually written down in independent gospels, I would expect their similarities and differences to look something like those varied versions of a single lament seen above. What I imagine instead is that in the Jerusalem community the female lament tradition turned the male exegetical tradition into a passion-resurrection story once and for all forever. The dosest we can get to that story now is the Cross Gospel, whose insistence on cornmunal passion and communal resurrection may be the strongest index of those origins. The gift of the lament tradition is not just that we know the names of Mary Magdalene and the other women, but that their passion-.resurrection story moved into the heart of the Christian tradition forever. And once it was there, within a decade of the death of Jesus, others would compose variations on it, but nobody would ever replace it or eliminate it.

October 30, 2000