ABSTRACT
Critical dissection of the biblical text has often been seen as an irreligious act. Examples from the history of biblical scholarship abound, such as the public outcry that greeted the publication of David Friedrich Strauss's The life of Jesus, critically examined in 1835-56. If critical dissection of the Bible has often been seen as a sacrilegious act, the dissection of cadavers has been only slightly less suspect throughout much of Christian history. In recent years, innumerable dissections of the corpus have been performed by biblical surgeons in search of the historical Jesus. The first great dissection of this sort, however, was performed by Albert Schweitzer in Strasbourg in 1905. But Crossan's anatomy in turn appears squeamish, even shallow, compared to that of Burton Mack, whose dismemberment and dissection of the body of Jesus traditions assembled in the canonical Gospels is terrifyingly thorough.
