Excavating Jesus Summary

“Excavating Jesus” proved to be a unique blend of ground as gospel, as self-claimed in its introduction. However, after the engaging introduction, filled with facts and fun quips from the authors, the reader was pulled away from the goal of excavating Jesus and towards a textual representation of first century history that no longer focused on the historical Jesus but rather the historical Christian.
Written by John Dominic Crossan, an Irish-American Catholic religious scholar, and Johnathan Reed, an archeologist specializing in early Christianity, the authors presented a book as well grounded as their esteemed credentials. Crossan’s pairing with Reed perfectly parallels his relationship with biblical texts, as he evaluates them on strata …show more content…
However, the mausoleum of Augustus is only remotely linked to that of Jesus - and even so, linked only in the examining obvious social structures rather than the actual burial of Jesus. A chapter entirely devoted to how kings of other countries bury themselves is dull and irrelevant for the reader who would have already concluded from the previous chapters’ emphasis on Jesus being a Jew, that he was of course not buried in the grand tomb implied by the gospel texts or the large churches devoted to the Holy Sepulcher. The text then speculates on the type of burial Jesus would have had through examination of different burial types across the Mediterranean, but it draws no conclusions on fact. The conversation about what was meant by resurrection by first century Jews was a far more interesting topic that was unfortunately short in Excavating Jesus. The book would have a firmer grasp on who the historical Jesus was if it focused more deeply on the contexts immediately surrounding Jesus (other than the fact that he was a peasant Jew) and cut out the sections on information only marginally linked to the subject at