Jesus' Life
...s/her PIPA 2 way of life and his or her thoughts and accomplishments. That is exactly what the two authors try to do with Jesus’ life. In other words they try to explore every event in Jesus’ life that made him what he was when he was alive and what he became after his death. Borg states that Jesus grew up in Nazareth, which was only four miles away from Sepphoris- a very cosmopolitan city with lots of trade going on and with a multi-language/multi-culture population. Both the authors agree on the Jewishness of Jesus but they have different reasons for arriving in the same conclusion. Borg believes that Jesus was a Jew not only by birth and socialization, but he remained a Jew all of his life. His scripture was the Jewish Bible. He spoke as a Jew to other Jews. His early followers were Jewish. Jesus did not intend to establish a new religion, but saw himself as having a mission within Judaism (Borg, 22). On the other side, Crossan argues that Jesus’ Jewishness is proved by the body/society interaction, the politic-body and body- politic connection, in which the former is always a microcosm of the latter (Crossan, 103). The body/society interaction consists of the fact that based on the purity system, a system that divided people into classes by their outside physical appearance and condition, the body of a person played an important role in telling where that person was in the social ladder. We know that the purity system existed in the first century Jewish world and the fact that Jesus opposed it, means that he was part of that world. That is how Crossan proves Jesus’ Jewishness. Both the authors believe that Jesus was a tekton, which means a carpenter. If Jesus was a carpenter, therefore, he belonged to the Artisan class, that group pushed into the dangerous space between Peasants who owned land, and the Expendables or Degradeds ranging from outcasts and beggars, to hustlers and slaves. PIPA 3 Another important fact to mention is that both the authors draw a distinction between what Jesus was and how he was seen by others during the time that he was alive and after he died. Borg himself examines Jesus as the Pre-Easter Jesus and as the Post- Easter Jesus. By the Pre-Easter Jesus he means Jesus as a figure of history before his death. He means Jesus as being compassionate and attacking the purity system; he means Jesus as being a Jew and an artisan, as a spirit person and as a teacher of wisdom; he means Jesus as being a person who did not discriminate between men and women and he also means Jesus as welcoming all to the Kingdom of God. On the other hand, The Post- Easter Jesus is seen by Borg as the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience (Borg, 16). Beginning with Easter, the early movement continued to experience Jesus as a living reality after his death, but in a radically new way. After...