Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.7
ant', 'a free spirit', 'the proverbial party animal', 'a vagabond sage', 'a simple
sage', 'a subversive sage', 'the subverter of the everyday world around him'
(Funk); 178 Jesus as a liberation theologian; 179 a Jesus almost completely shorn of
kingdom of God language and Jewish concerns, emerging instead as a teacher of
aphoristic wisdom heavily influenced by the Cynic philosophy of Hellenized Galilee;
180 'a social gadfly, an irritant on the skin of conventional mores and values', a
Cynic Jesus. 181 Much more carefully delineating on his broad canvas and giving
welcome renewed attention to the stories of Jesus' healings, Crossan nevertheless
ends up with Jesus as 'a peasant Jewish Cynic' calling for a radical egalitarianism
and proclaiming 'the brokerless kingdom of God'. 182 Borg has developed a more
richly rounded picture of Jesus, 183 but stands within the Jesus Seminar in characterising
Jesus as 'a teacher of a culturally subversive wisdom . . . who taught a
subversive and alternative wisdom'. 184 This is not the nineteenth-century Liberal
redivivus. But it is a Jesus stripped of the elements of (later) faith which modernity
has found so problematic. Nor is it the kindly nineteenth-century Sunday
School teacher who has thus been recovered. But it is a Jesus who could well be
imagined in many a twentieth-century faculty staff room or as an independent
'loose cannon' academic, with his unsettling anecdotes, disturbing aphorisms, and
provocative rhetoric. 185 Consequently, the same question arises once again which
178. Quotations from Funk, Honest 204, 208, 212, 252-53, 302.
179. J. M. Robinson, 'The Jesus of Q as Liberation Theologian', a paper delivered to the
Jesus Seminar in 1991, published in Piper, ed., The Gospel behind the Gospels 259-1 A.
180. B. L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1988) ch. 2; e.g., 'Jesus' wisdom incorporated the pungent invitation to insight and the
daring to be different that characterized the Cynic approach to life' (69); similarly 'Q and a
Cynic-Like Jesus', in W. E. Arnal and M. Desjardins, eds., Whose Historical Jesus? (SCJ 7;
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University, 1997) 25-36.
181. L. E. Vaage, Galilean Upstarts: Jesus' First Followers According to Q (Valley
Forge: Trinity, 1994) 102.
182. Crossan, Historical Jesus 421-22. As Witherington notes, Crossan's more popular
version, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994) 121-22
seems to modify the earlier 'Jewish Cynic peasant model' (Jesus Quest 89). The qualifications
increase in Crossan, Birth 280-81, 333-35, 412-13. Fuller critique in Witherington, Jesus Quest
64-92; Wright, Jesus 44-65.
183. In Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987) Borg developed his
earlier portrayal by adding characterisation of Jesus as a holy person conscious of Spirit empowering
and Jesus as a sage or teacher of wisdom (see Borg's own account in Jesus in Contemporary
Scholarship 26-28). Like Horsley (see §4.6 above), he also emphasizes Jesus' social
world. He summarizes his portrayal of Jesus in M. Borg, ed., Jesus at 2000 (Boulder:
Westview, 1997) 11: Jesus was (1) a Spirit person, (2) a healer, (3) a wisdom teacher, (4) a social
prophet, (5) a movement initiator.
184. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision 115-16; Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship 9-10.
185. Funk himself notes that 'the use of "itinerant" or "transient" [in relation to Jesus]
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