John Dominic Crossan

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John Dominic Crossan (born Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, 1934) is an Irish American biblical scholar known for co-founding the Jesus Seminar. As a major figure in the fields of Biblical archaeology, anthropology and New Testament textual criticism, he is a popular lecturer, but is dismissed by those critical of his historical methodology. He has appeared in many television documentaries about Jesus and the Bible.

Contents

1 Life
2 Career
3 Books
4 External links

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.

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 remained until retiring from teaching 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.

Career

Crossan suggests Jesus may have been an illiterate peasant, but also a man of great wisdom and courage who taught a message of inclusiveness, tolerance, and liberation.

Crossan was, along with Robert Funk, a cofounder in 1985 of the Jesus Seminar, a group of academic scholars who seek, following Rudolf Bultmann, to "demythologize" Jesus. Crossan has also done much with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). He served as co-chair of the Jesus Seminar for its first decade.

Books

Scanning the Sunday Gospel,1966
The Gospel of Eternal Life, 1967
In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, 1973, reprinted 1992, ISBN 0060616067
The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, 1975, reprinted 1988, ISBN 0944344062
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 0866839593
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 0060616296
The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images, 1994, reprinted 1998, ISBN 0785809015
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, ISBN 0060616628
Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, 1995, ISBN 0060614803
Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus , edited with Richard Watts, 1996, ISBN 0664258425
The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus, 1998, ISBN 0060616601
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand up?: A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan, 1999, ISBN 0801021758
The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conflict (Rockwell Lecture Series), with Luke Timothy Johnson, Werner H. Kelber, 1999, ISBN 156338289X
A Long Way from Tipperary: A Memoir, 2000, ISBN 0060699744
Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts, with Jonathan L. Reed, 2001, ISBN 0060616342
In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom, with Jonathan L. Reed, 2004, ISBN 0060514574

External links

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