His work is controversial, portraying theSecond Coming as a late corruption of Jesus' message and saying that Jesus' divinity is metaphorical.[1]In place of theeschatological message of the Gospels, Crossan emphasizes the historical context of Jesus and of his followers immediately after his death.[1] He describes Jesus' ministry as founded on free healing and communal meals, negating the social hierarchies of Jewish culture and theRoman Empire.[2]
Crossan is a major scholar in historical Jesus research.[1][3]In particular, he andBurton Mack advocated for a non-eschatological view of Jesus, a view that contradicts the more common view that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher.[3]
Crossan was born on 17 February 1934,[4] inNenagh,County Tipperary, Ireland. Though his father was a banker, Crossan was steeped in rural Irish life, which he experienced through frequent visits to the home of his paternal grandparents. Upon graduation fromSt Eunan's College, a boardinghigh school, in 1950, Crossan joined theServites, aCatholicreligious order, and moved to the United States. He was trained at Stonebridge Seminary,Lake Bluff,Illinois, then ordained a priest in 1957.
Crossan married Margaret Dagenais, a professor atLoyola University Chicago in the summer of 1969. She died in 1983 due to aheart attack. In 1986, Crossan married Sarah Sexton, a social worker with two grown children. Since his retirement from academia, Crossan has continued to write and lecture.[1]
Crossan portrays Jesus as a healer and wise man who taught a message of inclusiveness, tolerance, and liberation. In his view, Jesus' 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]
While contemporary scholars see more value in noncanonical gospels than past scholars did, Crossan goes further and identifies a few noncanonical gospels as earlier than and superior to the canonical ones.[3] The very early dating of these non-canonical sources is not accepted by the majority of biblical scholars.[6]Central to Crossan's methodology is the dating of texts.[7] This is laid out more or less fully inThe Historical Jesus in one of the appendices. He dates part of the CopticGospel of Thomas to the 50s AD, as well as the first layer of the hypotheticalQ Document (in this he is heavily dependent on the work ofJohn Kloppenborg). He also assigns a portion of theGospel of Peter, which he calls the "Cross Gospel", to a date preceding thesynoptic gospels, the reasoning of which is laid out more fully inThe Cross that Spoke: The Origin of the Passion Narratives. He believes the "Cross Gospel" was the forerunner to the passion narratives in thecanonical gospels. He does not date the synoptics until the mid to late 70s AD, starting with theGospel of Mark and ending withLuke in the 90s. As for theGospel of John, he believes part was constructed at the beginning, and another part closer to the middle, of the 2nd century AD. FollowingRudolf Bultmann, he believes there is an earlier "Signs Gospel" source for John as well. His dating methods and conclusions are quite controversial, particularly regarding the dating of Thomas and the "Cross Gospel".[6]
InGod and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), Crossan assumes that the reader is familiar with key points from his earlier work on the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus, his Kingdom movement, and the surrounding matrix of the Roman imperial theological system ofreligion, 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 toCaesar Augustus."[8] Crossan cites their adoption and application by the early Christians to Jesus as denying them to Caesar 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 calledmajestas and we call high treason."[8]
InWho Killed Jesus (1995), he draws together a wide range of sources to demonstrate that the Jews not only did not crucify Jesus but that they were not consulted by Pontius Pilate. Further, they did not have a meeting on the eve of Passover (meetings were and are forbidden on that day). He then discusses why these tales appear in the Gospels.
InThe Power of Parables: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus, Crossan proposes a new interpretation of the biblical text: according to his thesis, the Gospels should be seen not as an actual biography, but as "megaparables", in the sense that the life of Jesus was shaped by his teachings, therefore creating some "megaparables", neither completely historical nor completely fictitious. At the end of the book, Crossan states "I conclude that Jesus really existed, that we can know the significant sequence of his life...but that he comes to us trailing clouds of fiction, parables by him and about him, particular incidents as miniparables and whole gospels as megaparables."[9]
——— (1995).Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.ISBN9780060614799.OCLC31409853.
——— (1998).The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco.ISBN9780060616595.OCLC37843686.
——— (2010).The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of The Lord's Prayer. New York: HarperOne.ISBN978-0-06-187567-0.OCLC813123177.
——— (2012).The Power of Parable: How Fiction "by Jesus" became fiction "about Jesus". New York: HarperOne.ISBN9780061875694.OCLC855993872.
——— (2015).How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne.ISBN978-0-062-20359-5.OCLC900332685.
——— (2022).Render unto Caesar: The Struggle over Christ and Culture in the New Testament. San Francisco, CA: HarperOne.ISBN9780062964939.
——— (2024).Paul the Pharisee: A Vision Beyond the Violence of Civilization. Salem, OR: Polebridge Press of the Westar Institute (Home of the Jesus Seminar).ISBN9781598150995.
———, ed. (1991).Religious Worlds: Primary Readings in Comparative Perspective. Department of Religious Studies, DePaul University. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.ISBN9780840369505.OCLC472827588.
^abcTheissen, Gerd and Annette Merz. The historical Jesus: a comprehensive guide. Fortress Press. 1998. translated from German (1996 edition). Chapter 1. The quest of the historical Jesus. p. 1–15.
