John Dominic Crossan

Can the authentic words and deed of Jesus identified by the Jesus Seminar furnish a sufficient basis for a credible profile of the Jesus of history? That is the challenge faced by the contributors to this volume. Their efforts have resulted in a unique collection of studied impressions of Jesus. Here readers will see not Jesus the icon of myth and creed, but a provocative young man of first-century Palestine whose vision and determination to live the vision gave birth to a new form of faith and changed the course of history.

Meet Paul Again . . . for the First TimeContinuing in the tradition of The Last Week and The First Christmas, world-renowned New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan use the best of biblical and historical scholarship to expose the church's conspiracy to silence Jesus's most faithful disciple, the apostle Paul.

The Once and Future Jesus Conference took the quest of the historical Jesus to a new level. At this unprecedented gathering, leading thinkers turned their attention from the past to the future and asked: What do new understandings of Jesus mean for the church, the faith, and the world of tomorrow? Their answers can be found in the pages of this book.

The revered Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus explores the Christian culture wars--the debates over church and state--from a biblical perspective, exploring the earliest tensions evident in the New Testament, and offering a way forward for Christians today.Leading Bible scholar John Dominic Crossan, the author of the pioneering work The Historical Jesus, provides new insight into the Christian culture wars which began in the New Testament and persist strongly today. For decades, Americans have been divided on how Christians should relate to government and lawmakers, a dispute that has impacted every area of society and grown more rancorous over the past forty years. But as Crossan makes clear, this debate isn't new; it can be found in the New Testament itself, most notably in the tensions between Luke-Acts and Revelations. In the texts of Luke-Acts, Rome is considered favorably. In the book of Revelations, Rome is seen as the embodiment of evil in the world. Yet there is an alternative to these two extremes, Crossan explains. The historical Jesus and Paul, the earliest Christian teachers, were both strongly opposed to Rome, yet neither demonized the Empire. Crossan sees in Jesus and Paul's approach a model for Christians today that can be used to cut through the acrimony and polarization roiling our society and dividing us.

From his boyhood in Tipperary, Kildare, and Donegal to the pinnacle of biblical scholarship, John Dominic Crossan's adventurous spirit has led him to seek out the truth no matter where it leads. In this delightful memoir, the former monk and controversial biblical scholar tells how his work as a pioneering historical Jesus expert has led him from the traditional Catholicism of his youth to a more complex, sophisticated faith. With characteristic wit and candor, he describes the joys and challenges of growing up in Ireland and reveals how his life experiences--from Ireland to America, Rome, and Israel, from monastery to university, from priesthood to marriage--have shaped his understanding of God, Jesus, the Church, and what it means to be a true Christian.

From his boyhood in Tipperary, Kildare, and Donegal to the pinnacle of biblical scholarship, John Dominic Crossan's adventurous spirit has led him to seek out the truth no matter where it leads. In this delightful memoir, the former monk and controversial biblical scholar tells how his work as a pioneering historical Jesus expert has led him from the traditional Catholicism of his youth to a more complex, sophisticated faith. With characteristic wit and candor, he describes the joys and challenges of growing up in Ireland and reveals how his life experiences--from Ireland to America, Rome, and Israel, from monastery to university, from priesthood to marriage--have shaped his understanding of God, Jesus, the Church, and what it means to be a true Christian.

The acclaimed Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus and God & Empire the greatest New Testament scholar of our generation (John Shelby Spong) grapples with Scripture s two conflicting visions of Jesus and God, one of a loving God, and one of a vengeful God, and explains how Christians can better understand these passages in a way that enriches their faith.Many portions of the New Testament, introduce a compassionate Jesus who turns the other cheek, loves his enemies, and shows grace to all. But the Jesus we find in Revelation and some portions of the Gospels leads an army of angels bent on earthly destruction. Which is the true revelation of the Messiah and how can both be in the same Bible?How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian explores this question and offers guidance for the faithful conflicted over which version of the Lord to worship. John Dominic Crossan reconciles these contrasting views, revealing how different writers of the books of the Bible not only possessed different visions of God but also different purposes for writing. Often these books are explicitly competing against another, opposing vision of God from the Bible itself.Crossan explains how to navigate this debate and offers what he believes is the best central thread to what the Bible is all about. He challenges Christians to fully participate in this dialogue, thereby shaping their faith by reading deeply, reflectively, and in community with others who share their uncertainty. Only then, he advises, will Christians be able to read and understand the Bible without losing their faith."

Which is the true Messiah – the peace-loving preacher of the Sermon on the Mount, or the sword-wielding warrior of the book of Revelation? And how can both be in the same Bible? In what is perhaps his most provocative book yet, John Dominic Crossan investigates two conflicting visions of God to be found in the Bible: one that offers unconditional love and grace to all humanity; the other working to domesticate that radical vision by threatening punishment and retribution, and by propping up the status quo. People often assume that the second vision applies to the God of the Old Testament, while the first was revealed later, in the teaching and example of Jesus. But, as Crossan shows, the same contradiction appears in the Gospels and other writings of the New Testament. One thing is clear, argues Crossan: if you want to discover the Bible's best and purest revelation of God, then you must measure the Bible by Jesus. And to find the best and purest revelation of Jesus, he concludes, you must learn how to distinguish the words and actions of the original, historical Jesus from the teachings of those who came after him, but who did not fully understand his radical message. Only then will you understand how to read the Bible and still be a Christian.

The acclaimed Bible scholar and author of The Historical Jesus and God & Empire--"the greatest New Testament scholar of our generation" (John Shelby Spong) --grapples with Scripture's two conflicting visions of Jesus and God, one of a loving God, and one of a vengeful God, and explains how Christians can better understand these passages in a way that enriches their faith.Many portions of the New Testament, introduce a compassionate Jesus who turns the other cheek, loves his enemies, and shows grace to all. But the Jesus we find in Revelation and some portions of the Gospels leads an army of angels bent on earthly destruction. Which is the true revelation of the Messiah--and how can both be in the same Bible?How to Read the Bible and Still be a Christian explores this question and offers guidance for the faithful conflicted over which version of the Lord to worship. John Dominic Crossan reconciles these contrasting views, revealing how different writers of the books of the Bible not only possessed different visions of God but also different purposes for writing. Often these books are explicitly competing against another, opposing vision of God from the Bible itself.Crossan explains how to navigate this debate and offers what he believes is the best central thread to what the Bible is all about. He challenges Christians to fully participate in this dialogue, thereby shaping their faith by reading deeply, reflectively, and in community with others who share their uncertainty. Only then, he advises, will Christians be able to read and understand the Bible without losing their faith.

The world's foremost Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan shows us how the parables present throughout the New Testament not only reveal what Jesus wanted to teach but also provide the key for explaining how the Gospels' writers sought to explain the Prophet of Nazareth to the world. In this meaningful exploration of the metaphorical stories told by Jesus and the Gospel writers, Crossan combines the biblical expertise of his The Greatest Prayer with a historical and social analysis that harkens closely to his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, creating an illuminating and nuanced exploration of the Scripture that fans of Marcus Borg and Bart Ehrman will find fascinating and essential.

Controversial new book by an internationally respected expert on Jesus and his time. Argues that Jesus' parables became the inspiration and model for the way he is presented in the Gospels.

Every Sunday, the Lord's Prayer echoes in every Church around the world. It is an indispensable element of the faith. It is the way Jesus taught his followers to pray, and encapsulates the essential beliefs and attitudes to which all Christians aspire. Here, John Dominic Crossan, one of the world's leading experts on Jesus and his times, explores this foundational prayer line by line. This is quintessential Crossan, providing just the right amount of historical detail and literary insight to enhance our understanding, and drawing out the enduring richness and relevance of Jesus' words for today.

John Dominic Crossan is widely regarded as the leading authority on the words and life of Jesus Christ. His classic national bestseller, Jesus, is a powerful and controversial portrait of a courageous revolutionary, philosopher, and political agitator who challenged the prevailing rules of the social order. Bold, moving, and provocative, a book that will affect every Christian reader deeply and profoundly, Jesus is a remarkable work that presents a very different view of a saviour and king of peace who proclaimed - in thought and action - that all may participate in the rule of God.

Using the best of biblical and historical scholarship, this title presents a fresh understanding of early Christianity.

In The First Christmas, two of today's top Jesus scholars, Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, show how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The First Christmas explores the beginning of the life of Christ, peeling away the sentimentalism that has build up over two thousand years around this most well known of all stories to reveal the truth of what the Gospels actually say. Borg and Crossan help us to see this familiar narrative afresh by answering the question 'What do these stories mean' from the perspective of both the first and the twenty-first centuries. They successfully show that the Christmas story, read in its original context, is far richer and more challenging than people imagine.

In this revolutionary work, John Dominic Crossan reveals that the Passion and Resurrection Narratives in the four canonical Gospels are radical revisions of an earlier Gospel account. He argues boldly that the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, discovered in the grave of a Christian monk in Egypt circa 1886, contains the earliest version of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He describes how the authors of the four Gospels revised the early account of how their revision predominated as Roman authority grew. Lacking in the revision, he suggests, is the very heart of the earlier Passion: its depiction of Jesus' death as the consummation of Israel's pain and the resurrection as the vindication of Israel's faith. ""A gifted writer--lucid, lively, and refreshingly frank. . . . Crossan combines mastery of the material and . . . amazing originality and ingenuity. His research has illuminated, from a new angle, the problem of the growth of the gospels."" --Morton Smith, professor emeritus of history and special lecturer in religion, Columbia University ""Crossan writes with the pen of angels and takes up the formidable task, requiring skill of heaven, of winning a fresh hearing for the extra-canonical Gospel of Peter. . . . Only a scholar of Crossan's perspicacity, independence of perspective, and capacity for persuasive argument could have framed and presented with such elegance this long-neglected Christian writing. No one who cares for the formative age of Western civilization and for the history of religion in that time will want to miss this masterpiece of scholarly with and intelligence."" --Jacob Neusner, Underleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies, Brown University John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. He has written twenty books on the historical Jesus in the last thirty years, four of which have become national religious bestsellers: The Historical Jesus (1991), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), Who Killed Jesus? (1995), and The Birth of Christianity (1998). He is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a former chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association for biblical study based in the United States.

The four canonical gospels are long set in established sequence as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This book is about four other gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Gospel of Mark; the Gospel of Peter, and Egerton Papyrus 2. These four other gospels have generally been regarded as mere digests or collages of the canonical gospels, whereas in fact, as Professor Crossan persuasively shows, the four others hold within their mutilated fragments independent or earlier traditions than those tradition has canonized. Four Other Gospels proposes a spectrum of relations between the canonical gospels and these others. This spectrum ranges from the Gospel of Thomas, which is a parallel and independent tradition, to Egerton Papyrus 2, on which both John and Mark are dependent, to the Secret Gospel of Mark, on which Mark directly and John indirectly are dependent, and on to the Gospel of Peter, which contains an original Passion-Resurrection source used by all four of the canonical gospels, but which submitted to their eventual ascendancy by attempting a harmonization between it and them, and placed the new complex under the authority and authorship of Simon Peter. Four Other Gospels does not propose a new or alternative canon. The canon is a fact both of history and of theology. But the thesis of this book is that anyone who takes the four other gospels seriously and thoughtfully will never again be able to read the four canonical gospels in quite the same way. A new light has been shed. .".".Simply breathtaking..., can hardly fail to convince the open-minded. Gospel studies - and hence studies about Jesus and the origins of Christianity - should never be the same again "" --James M. Robinson ""I found Four Other Gospels fascinating and incisive. . . . Here is a book that splendidly exemplifies the new possibilities for research that integrates canonical and extracanonical sources."" --Elaine Pagels .".".An important contribution to the ongoing discussion of the relation of non-canonical gospels to the four gospels; written with clarity, creativity and an attractive style, this is a book of intriguing speculation leading to new insights."" --George MacRae, SJ John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. He has written twenty books on the historical Jesus in the last thirty years, four of which have become national religious bestsellers: The Historical Jesus (1991), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), Who Killed Jesus? (1995), and The Birth of Christianity (1998). He is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a former chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association for biblical study based in the United States.

The aphoristic form conveys universal truths in a distinctive, compressed format. Such sayings go straight to the heart of the matter and linger long afterward in the memory. Curiously enough, the greatest aphorist of all time, Jesus, often goes unrecognized as such; and, more importantly, his aphorisms--a major part of his teachings--have been largely overlooked by biblical scholars. Now, In Fragments offers the first comprehensive analysis of Jesus's aphorisms as an area of study distinct from, but equal in importance to, the parables and dialogues. The heart of Crossan's groundbreaking work is his discussion and interpretation of over one hundred thirty aphorisms of Jesus culled from the narrative Gospel of Mark, the discourse Gospel Q, their dependent versions in Matthew and Luke, and their independent versions in such works as the Gospel of John, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Apostolic Fathers. This representative selection inaugurates a landmark discussion of Jesus's aphorisms, raising the aphoristic tradition to the level of interest that the parabolic tradition has always received. In Fragments offers an original method for identifying, organizing, and correlating these sayings that results in a whole new analysis of the stages of New Testament development for this genre. Crossan suggests answers to a variety of critical questions about the historical transmission of these sayings of Jesus, including the shift from the spoken to the written tradition; analyzes their internal structure and dynamic; shows how individual aphorism can be grouped to shed light on each other; discusses how they are transformed into dialogues and stories, and the effect on the original sayings; and, above all, distinguishes what is the ""peculiar gift"" of the aphoristic mode, as opposed to teachings embodied in the narrative or dialogue forms. John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. He has written twenty books on the historical Jesus in the last thirty years, four of which have become national religious bestsellers: The Historical Jesus (1991), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), Who Killed Jesus? (1995), and The Birth of Christianity (1998). He is a former cochair of the Jesus Seminar and a former chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

John Dominic Crossan's In Parables demonstrated how Jesus's parables demolished an idolatry of time. In this book, he shows how the parables likewise preclude an idolatry of language. In a new, creative synthesis, Raid on the Articulate juxtaposes the sayings and parables of Jesus with the works of modern Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to reveal fresh interpretations. Crossan locates both men as literary iconoclasts, parablers who can evoke for us the other side of silence. The gift they bring is ""cosmic eschatology,"" the ability to ""stand on the brink of nonsense and absurdity and not be dizzy."" The discussion begins with Comedy and Transcendence, ""a comedy too deep for laughter."" Language is seen most openly and acknowledged most freely as structured play, opening the narrow gate to transcendence. This precludes language being mistaken for the gate itself. This in turn raises the question of Form and Parody. As Crossan writes, ""Why mock the craftsman skilled in silver and gold and not mock the artisan skilled in form and genre? What if the aniconic God became trapped in icons made of language?"" In Jesus we find the most magisterial warning against graven words and encapsulation of God in case law, proverb, or beatitude. When Jesus says, ""Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it"" he presents a paradox insoluble by faith in language. Borges performs a similar function in literature when he inserts footnotes referring to nonexistent books. Both are arguing against the idolatry of imprisoning reality in the words that point to it. Parable and Paradox makes the case for parable as paradox formed into story. It is in this context that Jesus and Borges must be understood. Analyzing many of Jesus's parables, especially ""The Good Samaritan,"" and comparing them structurally to Borges's work, Crossan sees them as single or double reversals of their audiences"" most profound expectations. It is these that lend them both their power and their paradox. Raid on the Articulate concludes with considerations of the plasticity of time in Jesus and Borges and what, finally, we can say about them as men from their ""fragile and aphoristic art."" Emphasizing both biblical and literary materials, John Dominic Crossan achieves a deepened understanding of New Testament texts and forms, an understanding possible only when the unique literary aspect of Jesus's sayings is acknowledged. ""Raid on the Articulate makes a brilliant example of how fruitfully structuralist procedures in literary criticism may be employed in the study of biblical literature. It is, indeed, a book that one suspects to be of a truly seminal order."" --Nathan A. Scott Jr., University of Virginia John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. He has written twenty books on the historical Jesus in the last thirty years, four of which have become national religious bestsellers: The Historical Jesus (1991), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), Who Killed Jesus? (1995), and The Birth of Christianity (1998). He is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a former chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association for biblical study based in the United States.