John Dominic Crossan

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John Dominic Crossan (b. Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, 1934) is an Irish-American religious scholar known for co-founding the controversial Jesus Seminar. Crossan is a major figure in the fields of biblical archaeology, anthropology and New Testament textual and higher criticism. He is also a lecturer who has appeared in television documentaries about Jesus and the Bible. He is especially vocal in the field of Historical Jesus studies, receiving criticism from other scholars regarding his methodology.

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[edit] Life

Though his father was a banker, Crossan was steeped in the rural Irish life experienced in frequent visits to the home of his paternal grandparents. On graduation from St. Eunan's College, a boarding high school in 1950, Crossan joined the Servites, a Roman Catholic religious order and moved to the United States. He was trained at Stonebridge Seminary, Lake Bluff, Illinois, then ordained a priest in 1957. Crossan returned to Ireland where he earned his Doctorate of Divinity in 1959 at Maynooth College, the Irish national seminary. There followed two more years of study in biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Thus equipped, he returned to the seminary which ordained him, and through four years of teaching he "first began to learn something about the Bible" as he puts it. In 1965 Crossan embarked on two additional years of study, this time in archaeology based at the Ecole Biblique in Jordanian East Jerusalem. His work led him to journey through many Middle Eastern countries before escaping just days prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War of 1967.[1]

After a year at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, and a year at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Crossan chose to resign his priesthood. He cited as reasons both a desire for more academic freedom, and the freedom to be bound in matrimony. He married Margaret Dagenais, a professor at Loyola University (Chicago) in the summer of 1969, and joined the faculty of DePaul University that fall, where he taught undergraduates Comparative Religion for twenty-five years until retiring in 1995. His first wife died of a heart attack in 1983. Crossan married Sarah Sexton, a social worker with two grown children, in 1986. Since his academic retirement, Crossan has lived in the Orlando, Florida area, remaining active in research, writing, and teaching seminars.

[edit] Career

Crossan suggests Jesus was an illiterate "Jewish Cynic" from a landless peasant background, initially a follower of John the Baptist. Jesus was a healer and man of great wisdom and courage who taught a message of inclusiveness, tolerance, and liberation. "His strategy . . . was the combination of free healing and common eating . . . that negated the hierarchical and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power . . . He was neither broker nor mediator but . . . the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity or humanity and itself."[2]

Out of his study of cross-attestation and strata of the ancient texts, Crossan questions the facticity of many of the gospel stories of Jesus, including his "nature miracles", the virgin birth, and the raising of Lazarus. While pointing out the meager attestation and apparent belatedness of the miracles' appearance in the trajectory of the canon, Crossan takes the opposite view, that Jesus was known during earliest Christianity as a powerful magician, which was "a very problematic and controversial phenomenon not only for his enemies but even for his friends," who began washing miracles out of the tradition early on.

Crossan maintains the Gospels were never intended to be taken literally by their authors. He challenges those who would debate whether Jesus "really" walked on water to recognize that, whether history or parable, the larger issue is the meaning of the anecdote. He proposes the historical probability that, like all but one known victim of crucifixion, Jesus' body never made it to a tomb, but was scavenged by animals.[3] Crossan believes in "resurrection" by faith but holds that bodily resuscitation was never contemplated by early Christians. He believes that the rapture is based on a misreading of I Thessalonians.

Central to Crossan's methodology is the dating of texts. This is laid out more or less fully in The Historical Jesus in one of the appendices. He dates part of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas to the 50s CE, as well as the first layer of the hypothetical Q Document (in this he is heavily dependent on the work of John Kloppenborg). He also assigns a portion of the Gospel of Peter, which he calls the "Cross Gospel," to a date preceding the synoptic gospels, the reasoning of which is laid out more fully in The Cross that Spoke: The Origin of the Passion Narratives. He believes the "Cross Gospel" was the forerunner to the passion narratives in the canonical gospels. He does not date the synoptics until the mid to late 70s CE, starting with the Gospel of Mark and ending with Luke in the 90s. As for the Gospel of John, he believes part was constructed at the beginning of the 2nd century CE and another part closer to the middle of the century. Following Rudolf Bultmann, he believes there is an earlier "Signs Source" for John as well. His dating methods and conclusions are quite controversial, particularly regarding the dating of Thomas and the "Cross Gospel." Also, many scholars think that it is presumptuous to assign "layers" to the Q Document as it is only a hypothetical source.

Crossan writes books for both academic and popular audiences. His two lengthiest books are The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (1998).

Two of Crossan's briefer popular books are Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) and Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (1995).

Crossan has also co-authored a book about Jesus and another about Paul with archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2001, 2004), which provide contextualization of the lives and times of these two men.

In God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), Crossan starts with the presumption of reader familiarity with key points from his earlier work on the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus, his Kingdom movement, and the surrounding matrix of the Roman system of Imperial theology of religion, war, victory, peace, but discusses them in the broader context of the escalating violence in world politics and popular culture of today. Within that matrix, he points out, early in the book, that "(t)here was a human being in the first century who was called 'Divine,' 'Son of God,' 'God,' and 'God from God,' whose titles were 'Lord,' 'Redeemer,' 'Liberator,' and 'Saviour of the World.'" "(M)ost Christians probably think that those titles were originally created and uniquely applied to Christ. But before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus." Crossan cites the adoption of them by the early Christians to apply to Jesus as denying them of Caesar the Augustus. "They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. Either that was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majestas and we call high treason." [4] He ends the book asking the question "Is Bible-fed Christian violence supporting or even instigating our imperial violence as the New Roman Empire?"

Crossan was, along with Robert Funk, a co-founder in 1985 of the Jesus Seminar, a group of academics studying a so-called "historical Jesus". He served as co-chair of the Jesus Seminar for its first decade. Crossan is also a member of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).

[edit] Books

  • Scanning the Sunday Gospel,1966
  • The Gospel of Eternal Life, 1967
  • In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, 1973, reprinted 1992, ISBN 0-06-061606-7
  • The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, 1975, reprinted 1988, ISBN 0-944344-06-2
  • Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges, 1976
  • Finding Is the First Act: Trove Folktales and Jesus' Treasure Parable, 1979
  • Cliffs of Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus, 1980
  • A Fragile Craft: The Work of Amos Niven Wilder, 1981
  • In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus, 1983
  • Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon, 1985, reprinted 1992, ISBN 0-86683-959-3
  • Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the Jesus Tradition, 1986
  • The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative, 1988
  • The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, 1991, ISBN 0-06-061629-6
  • The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images, 1994, reprinted 1998, ISBN 0-7858-0901-5
  • Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, ISBN 0-06-061662-8
  • Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, 1995, ISBN 0-06-061480-3
  • Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus , edited with Richard Watts, 1996, ISBN 0-664-25842-5
  • The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus, 1998, ISBN 0-06-061660-1
  • Will the Real Jesus Please Stand up?: A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, 1999, ISBN 0-8010-2175-8
  • The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conflict (Rockwell Lecture Series), with Luke Timothy Johnson, Werner H. Kelber, 1999, ISBN 1-56338-289-X
  • A Long Way from Tipperary: A Memoir, 2000, ISBN 0-06-069974-4
  • Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, with Jonathan L. Reed, 2001, ISBN 0-06-061634-2
  • In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, with Jonathan L. Reed, 2004, ISBN 0-06-051457-4
  • The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem with Marcus J. Borg, HarperSanFrancisco (February 28, 2006) ISBN 0060845392 ISBN-13: 978-0060845391
  • God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, HarperSanFrancisco, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-084323-6

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ A Long Way from Tipperary: A Memoir (2000)
  2. ^ The Historical Jesus, p 421-22
  3. ^ Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)
  4. ^ Crossan, John Dominic, God and Empire, 2007, p. 28

[edit] External links

[edit] Listening

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