The Trauma of the Cross: How the Followers of Jesus Came to Understand the Crucifixion

by Damian Barry Smyth and Damian B. Smith

Book Overview

How did the early Christians cope with the shame of the crucifixion? This intriguing book says that the only way possible was to transform the shame into the glory of the resurrection. The author, a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809139081
• ISBN13: 9780809139088
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Paulist Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Recycling Hebrew Bible into Christian Scriptures

Where were you when they shot President Kennedy? I was studying in Rome, and I recall the hangdog looks of my American classmates. They were deeply ashamed. America tried to cope by setting up a commission, interrogating witnesses, running the video over, and over, and over... It must have been just like that for the first Jesus People. Crucifixion meant deep degradation. The first Jesus People, being Jews, coped by turning to their Scriptures. There they began slowly to see things they had never seen before, to find answers to the question: Why this? Texts from Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalms, started froth from their original context, and were pieced togther into patchwork quilts, old pieces in new patterns which would evolve over decades into the passion narratives of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John. In this process the initial earthquake of the crucifixion would be followed by historical aftershocks: the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; the Great Fire of Rome; the expulsion of the Jesus People from the synagogues... Each aftershock would provide fresh impulse to the process of recycling Hebrew Scriptures into Christian Gospels. The Trauma of the Cross is an extended look at this process of coping with crucifixion and the resultant birth of the New Testament. As such it will appeal not only to Jews and Christians by highlighting their shared heritage, but it will also appeal to the strictly secular historian of ideas by tracing the genesis of an Idea of unprecedented staying power.