Books by John Dominic Crossan

An imaginative and illuminating study, Finding Is the First Act places historical thinking in creative tension with literary appreciation. The structures of Jesus's parable of the hidden treasure (Matt 13:44) are examined by mapping its plot options (finding, acting, buying) in view of other Jewish treasure stories and the vast array of treasure plots in world folklore. Startling differences emerge in the plot options chosen by Jesus that point to a new understanding of the directive to give up all one has for the Kingdom of God. ""Why Jesus' treasure parable? For three reasons that I am aware of. First, . . . the story has always fascinated me. . . . Second, in recent work on parables there has often been a tendency to concentrate especially on the longer parables of Jesus. I wanted deliberately to move in theopposite direction and to give full emphasis to a very short parable . . . . Third, this particular parable, in contrast, for example, to that of The Mustard Seed, does not furnish much grist for the diachronic mill of biblical studies. I was deliberately choosing an item which, in isolation from its Matthean context, could hardly sustain a monograph study along the standard lines of tradition criticism.""--from the Preface

After his definitive The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan delivered Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography--a popularized, bestselling account of what we can know about the life of Jesus. Here he offers the core of his life's work--a concise and astonishing presentation of the authentic teachings and earliest images of the revolutionary Galilean sage. Crossan's fresh translations of Jesus' sayings show Jesus to be a teacher whose radical message that all are equal before God is as timely today as it was two thousand years ago. This picture is dramatically confirmed by the preConstantinian, Christian renderings of Jesus, which show that he was remembered by the first Christians not as God but as a revolutionary healer and leader.

When John Dominic Crossan's book, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, was published in 1973, it was heralded as a major development in research both on the parables and on the historical Jesus. This was due not only to its sophisticated use of historical, literary, and philosophical disciplines but also to the sensitive way in which they were combined and to the novel insights that resulted when this combination was focused on individual parables.The present book continues most directly and explicitly the study initiated by In Parables and may be regarded as bringing that earlier volume up to date on three major issues.Conceptually, the emphasis on metaphor from In Parables has led to the discussion of polyvalence, or semantic pluralism, in Jesus's parables. Pluralistic meaning is an intensely paradoxical concept and it raises issues that touch the very roots of our consciousness and our reality. Metaphor is now no longer a clearing within the forest of language but is rather the very ground of that language itself. Any given metaphor illumines and reveals the radical metaphoricity of all reality.Philosophically, the question is raised whether the polyvalence inherent in metaphor, along with the critically iterated claims for its untranslatability, may be better explained as a surplus of meaning, or as an absence of the meaning, a refusal of canonical meaning which is then the necessary but negative basis for the plurality of meanings and the abiding fecundity of interpretations.Exegetically, as specific example and deliberate narratival metaphor of the entire book, Jesus's serenely pastoral parable of the Sower, with its specified triad of gains, its plurality or polyvalence both of failure and success, is centrally discussed as textual focus for the volume.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A powerful and controversial portrait of a courageous revolutionary, philosopher, and political agitator who challenged the prevailing rules of the social order. 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.

This fascinating book makes the results of a lifetime of scholarship readily available to nonspecialists who want to meet the historical Jesus. Eminent biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan collaborates with pastor Richard G. Watts to rediscover the life, the work, and the message of the Man from...

The current controversy over the historical Jesus and his significance for both scholarship and religious belief continues to rage inside and outside the academy. In this volume, three distinguished New Testament scholars debate the historical, textual, and theological problems at the core of the controversy.John Dominic Crossan offers a theological defense of the historical reconstruction of Jesus, arguing that if Christian faith is not founded on the historical Jesus, it will fall into Docetism. Luke Timothy Johnson counters this thesis, arguing that the biblical Christ and his presence in the life of believers is the proper focus of Christian faith. Werner Kelber takes issue with both views. Placing them in the broader context and history of Christian hermeneutics, he seeks to overcome the alternatives that govern the controversy.John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at De Paul University.Luke Timothy Johnson is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Emory University.Werner H. Kelber is Turner Professor of Biblical Studies at Rice University.

The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown -- while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism -- never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as "Did Jesus die for our sins?" and "Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection?" Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith.

In The Greatest Prayer, foremost historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan, bestselling author of Historical Jesus and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, intimately explores the revolutionary meaning of the cornerstone of Christian faith: The Lord’s Prayer.

At the heart of the Bible is a moral and ethical call to fight unjust superpowers, whether they are Babylon, Rome, or even America. From the divine punishment and promise found in Genesis through the revolutionary messages of Jesus and Paul, John Dominic Crossan reveals what the Bible has to say about land and economy, violence and retribution, justice and peace, and, ultimately, redemption. In contrast to the oppressive Roman military occupation of the first century, he examines the meaning of the non-violent Kingdom of God prophesized by Jesus and the equality advocated by Paul to the early Christian churches. Crossan contrasts these messages of peace with the misinterpreted apocalyptic vision from the Book of Revelation, which has been misrepresented by modern right-wing theologians and televangelists to justify U.S. military actions in the Middle East.In God and Empire Crossan surveys the Bible from Genesis to Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation, and discovers a hopeful message that cannot be ignored in these turbulent times. The first-century Pax Romana, Crossan points out, was in fact a "peace" won through violent military action. Jesus preached a different kind of peace?a peace that surpasses all understanding?and a kingdom not of Caesar but of God. The Romans executed Jesus because he preached this Kingdom of God, a kingdom based on peace and justice, over the empire of Rome, which ruled by violence and force. For Jesus and Paul, Crossan explains, peace cannot be won the Roman way, through military victory, but only through justice and fair and equal treatment of all people.

A world-renowned scholar explores and explains the two views of God in the Bible - the violent God of vengeance and retribution, and the non-violent God who became incarnate in Jesus.

Every Sunday, the Lord's Prayer echoes in every Church around the world. It is an indispensable element of the faith. John Dominic Crossan, one of the world's leading experts on Jesus and his times, explores this foundational prayer line by line.

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.

Shows how history has biased our reading of the nativity story as it appears in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. This book 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.