John Dominic Crossan's comprehensive reconstruction of the historical Jesus — arguing he was a Jewish peasant Cynic whose movement was a radical egalitarian critique of Roman imperial order.
Jesus as peasant Jewish Cynic: not an apocalyptic prophet (against Schweitzer) but a wisdom teacher whose open table fellowship and free healing were a direct social challenge to the patronage-based order of Roman Palestine. Stratified methodology: ranking sources by antiquity and attestation across independent witnesses. Mediterranean anthropology: reading Jesus against the social structures of 1st-century peasant society.
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