c. 2000 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) By his own estimation, John Dominic Crossan has in the past 10 years written about a million words on Jesus. But Crossan’s critics always had the last word.

You write about Jesus as a peasant, they said, because you are from a peasant country (Ireland). You write about Jesus as a monk of sorts because you were a monk (for a time). You write about Jesus being oppressed by the Roman Empire because your people were oppressed (by the British).

“`That is not Jesus,’ they say; it is simply your own face at the bottom of a deep well.” So Crossan summarizes their challenge and his own purpose in writing “A Long Way From Tipperary: What a Former Irish Monk Discovered in His Search for the Truth” (Harper San Francisco).

“How has my own life influenced my understanding of the historical Jesus?” Crossan asks himself in the introduction to his memoir. “How does my role as a temporary background bit player clarify or distort my view of the leading character in a very long-running and still ongoing religious drama?”

Well? We’ll get to that. But first, let’s examine Crossan’s claim to being a “temporary background bit player.” “Temporary” he may be in the grand scheme of things, but a “background bit player” he’s not. Crossan is one of the most prolific, most visible of the modern Jesus scholars. His big book _ in size and sales_ “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant,” debuted in 1991 and spent six months on the Publishers Weekly religion best-sellers list.

More best sellers followed: “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography,” “Who Killed Jesus?” and “The Birth of Christianity.” So, too, did guest appearances on a raft of television shows examining the historical Jesus, including PBS’ Frontline “From Jesus to Christ” and ABC’s “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Search for Jesus,” which aired in June. When Jesus makes the cover of The New York Times, Time or Newsweek, chances are Crossan is quoted.

All of which has given Crossan, a retired professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago, a very high profile, a sizable following and a multitude of critics, some of whom might be surprised at the depth of Crossan’s faith.

They are so used to characterizing him by what he does not believe that they overlook what he does profess. For example, Crossan does not believe the accounts of Jesus walking on water in Matthew 14, Mark 6 and John 6 are literal ones. Instead, he sees them as parables of what happens when the church sets off on its own without being sure that Jesus is on board.

While Crossan has been engaged in what he calls “open heart surgery on Christianity,” his critics have assumed he has no heart at all. In “A Long Way From Tipperary,” he bares it and affirms that it is still Christian.

“There are those who insist I’m not a Christian, and that’s understandable,” he said in a telephone interview from his home near Orlando, Fla. “Christians who are literalists, who believe that everything that could be taken literally in the Bible ought to be taken literally, have lost their sense of parable, and what they’ve read (of his work), they’ve read as an attack on the gospels.”

Crossan distinguishes between such Bible literalists and fundamentalists. The latter Christians insist that their interpretation is the only one acceptable, Crossan said. They usually reject him out of hand. Some literalists may agree to disagree with him on whether a Bible passage is historical and move on in the discussion to what that passage might mean. Crossan can sometimes talk to literalists, he said.

But what gives him more hope is the experience he’s had working and living “where reason intersects with revelation and history intersects with faith.” After a decade of crisscrossing the country, spending time with church congregations representing a spectrum of Christianity, he’s found more and more people sharing that metaphorical corner with him.

“There are an awful lot of Christians, whose churches invite me to speak, who are more than ready to refuse any disjunction between revelation and faith, between their hearts and their brains,” he said.

That, and his own drive to better understand Jesus and his first-century world, keep Crossan going and inspired him to accept his critics’ challenge. The resulting memoir is the story of his childhood in Ireland, his sojourn as a monk, ordination as a priest and his decisions to leave both behind. “Not even a vow of obedience could make me sing a song I did not hear,” he writes.

He holds his personal life and his professional scholarship up to the light, looking for ways that one might have impinged on the other, especially in how he saw, and sees, the historical Jesus.

Well? Did he find that growing up in Ireland made him predisposed to see all empires as evil? It wasn’t that simple, he said. “I realized that as soon as we get a little power ourselves, we can be just as nasty as they are.”

Crossan lays his life out on the table beside his scholarship and lets readers draw their own conclusions. He says his own experiences have probably affected his understanding of who Jesus was and is.

“All postmodern theory tells me that’s the way life works,” he said. “My own sense of history tells me that past and present interact. Each changes the other. But I wanted to focus down and see how it worked.”

He says he hasn’t thought about whether anyone who professes faith in Jesus ought to ask him or herself the same question. “Sure,” he said, “the people who posed it to me never thought I’d really do it.”

DEA END HAUGHT