Join us for a weekend of world-class
biblical scholarship and cultural commentary featuring one of America's
most well known scholars of the Bible. Professor Crossan makes the
world of the Bible come alive and very compellingly relates scripture
to our modern culture and society. He will be delivering four lectures
including the Bentley Lecture on Sunday, September 25. Tickets for
some or all of the lectures can be purchased at the First Church
or the Salem Athenaeum.
John Dominic Crossan was born in 1934 in Ireland. His parents
lived in Portumna, County Galway, a town too small to have a good
hospital. So he was born in Nenagh, Country Tipperary. He is the
descendent of farmers and urban shopkeepers. His father was a
banker, and that entailed frequent relocations. Grade school was
in Naas, County Kildare. From 1945 to 1950, he attended St. Eunan’s
College in Letterkenny, County Donegal, where all classes were
taught in Gaelic and where he heard many representatives from
monastic orders
speak.
A representative from the Servite Order, a 13th century Roman
Catholic order, especially caught his attention. In 1951, after
graduating from high school, he came to the United States to study
at Stonebridge Seminary, a Servite major seminary in Lake Bluff,
Illinois near Chicago. He was ordained a priest in May, 1957.In
1957, he went to Maynooth College, the national seminary of Ireland,
for his theological doctorate. In 1959, Dr. Crossan went to the
Biblical Institute in Rome to specialize in the Bible for two
years.
He returned to the United States in 1961 to teach at the Servite
seminary from which he had been ordained. As an assistant professor
of Biblical Studies, he taught the complete Bible over a four-year
cycle. In 1965 he went for a two-year sabbatical to the Ecole
Biblique, the school of archeology run by the French Domonicans
in East Jerusalem. Then it was in Jordan. He took trips to Jordan,
Israel, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia
and Morocco.
In 1967, he returned to the United Sates to teach with the Servites
as Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at St. Mary of the
Lake Seminary in Mudelein, Illinois near Chicago. In 1968, he
resigned from the priesthood to marry Margaret Dagenais, the founder
of the Fine Arts Department at Loyola University in Chicago and
to move from seminary to university teaching. In 1969, he married
Margaret and began teaching at DePaul University.
In the years since, he has distinguished himself as an outstanding
scholar and teacher, involved with advancing the field of Biblical
Scholarship through his involvement with the well-known Jesus
Seminar and his own research and writing. He broke into prominence
in the field of New Testament studies in 1991 with the publication
of his book, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean
Jewish Peasant. It is a demanding book, but rewarding to the serious
reader.
It has been widely accepted in the scholarly community for quite
a long time that much in the New Testament is of challengeable
historical credibility, and that the Gospels contain many passages
created by people in the first and early second centuries, C.
E. – passages that do not report or record actual acts and
sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels are polemical documents
written as aids to conversion, not scientific biographies.
The very terseness and lack of contextual information in the
Gospels makes it easy (but erroneous) to read our own culture
into them. One of Crossan’s major contributions has been
to dig into what is known about the eastern Mediterranean in the
first century and use material from archaeology, anthropology,
classics, and other disciplines to delineate the social organization,
economy, politics, and religious character of Jesus’ time
to see him in his own time, not in ours.
Since The Historical Jesus was very detailed, Crossan wrote a
shorter, more accessible, less demanding version published as
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. After reading either of these
books, it is useful to read Crossan’s The Essential Jesus
which presents those sayings that Crossan believes are genuine
to the historical Jesus and couples them with the most common
iconic images of Jesus in the first century C.E.
In The Birth of Christianity, Crossan tackles an exceedingly
complex and difficult question: How did the work of Jesus of Nazareth
– centered in teaching and healing and carried on entirely
within the framework of first century Judaism – develop into
a separate religion that we have come to know as Christianity?
Crossan takes on a question sharply argued by scholars for a long
time and difficult to resolve: Did Paul just further develop something
central to the historical Jesus, or did he really bend this nascent
religion in a new direction of his own definition?
