John Dominic Crossan's Jesus is subtitled "a revolutionary biography." However, for the vast majority of Christians--Catholic or Protestant, evangelical or otherwise--this book is close to being a heretical work, if it has not already crossed that boundary.
This is not to say that the work has no value for the average Christian, because, indeed, it has much. It has, perhaps, a greater deal of value for the students and scholars of religion precisely because of the scholarship which is the foundation of the book itself. Crossan's academic credentials are impressive, and the materials which he uses to advance his thesis are exceedingly well documented.
Far from presenting a "revolutionary" biography, Crossan merely creates anew one of any number of Gnostic heresies which confronted the fledgling Christian church in the first two or three centuries of its existence. It most closely resembles that practiced by the Ebionites of the mid first and early second centuries C.E. (Strong, 669-670). Heresies such as this have surfaced again and again over time, only to meet the same ultimate fate which must Crossan's.
Crossan's basic premise, that Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Mediterranean Jewish peasant who preached a "radical egalitarianism"--an equality of all classes, races, and sexes--and that He was not, in addition, the begotten Son of God, does not rest well with the faith and practice of the Christian church. While attesting to the historical humanity of Jesus, this premise denies, or at least ignores, His divinity. Crossan, however, presents a significant volume of anthropological "evidence" to back up his claim, which is difficult to neglect if not dismiss.
Crossan is correct when he admonishes the reader that the four canonical gospels were not the only ones known to the fledgling church (xi). Theologically, the author relies heavily on the "Gospel of Thomas," a second century C.E. Gnostic document wh...