John Dominic Crossan

John Dominic Crossan (born February 17, 1934, Nenagh, Ireland) is an Irish-born American theologian and former Roman Catholic priest best known for his association with the Jesus Seminar, an organization of revisionist biblical scholars, and his controversial writings on the historical Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

Upon graduating from high school in Letterkenny, Ireland, in 1950, Crossan moved to Chicago, where he joined the Servites, a Roman Catholic monastic order. Ordained a priest in 1957, he returned to Ireland to study at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and received a doctorate in theology in 1959. He then studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome for two years before returning to his Servite community to teach. In 1965 he began study at the École Biblique et Archaéologie Française de Jérusalem (French Institute of Bible and Archaeology, Jerusalem), which was run by the Dominican order. Two years later he returned to Chicago to join the faculty of the Chicago Catholic Theological Union. In 1969 he resigned from the Servite priesthood, citing a longing for academic freedom and his intention to marry Margaret Deganais, a professor at Loyola University Chicago; they married that year. He soon joined the faculty of religious studies at Chicago’s DePaul University, where he taught until his retirement in 1995. After his retirement, Crossan continued to write and lecture.

Crossan’s early works focused on the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. His most famous and controversial work, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991), interpreted the figure of Jesus in his historical context as well as through the Gospels. That book and its 1994 successor, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, made Crossan one of the key figures in a new version of an old controversy concerning how best to distinguish the Jesus of history from the Jesus of the Gospels.

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Crossan believed that the divinity of Jesus “must be taken metaphorically.” He held that the traditional eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ life, which stressed his Second Coming, was a much later theological corruption of the historical facts, which were worthy of study and emulation in themselves. According to Crossan, theologians and historians also needed to explore the historical context in which the New Testament texts arose, generations before there was any notion of a Christian canon (a set of recognized scripture). Crossan’s books prompted scholars to study extrabiblical texts that might have had relevance to the Apostles and to early Christian communities.

To further this undertaking, in 1985 Crossan and the scholar Robert Funk cofounded the Jesus Seminar, a group of biblical scholars who generally rejected traditional views of Jesus’ life and ministry and emphasized the years immediately following his death. Crossan contributed to the seminar’s own version of the Gospels, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary (1993), which presented what the seminar believed were the most historically accurate statements in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the Gospel According to John, and the Gospel of Thomas.

Among Crossan’s many other works are Finding Is the First Act: Trove Folktales and Jesus’ Treasure Parable (1979), Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon (1985), The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998), God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), and How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (2015). With his wife, Crossan also wrote Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision (2018).