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