John Dominic Crossan
John Dominic Crossan (born in 1934 in Nenagh in County Tipperary in Ireland ) is a historian of religions Irish-American specializes in early Christianity. Former Catholic priest, founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar , he has been one of the main protagonists of what has been called the " third quest of historical Jesus " Biography His grandparents were of rural origin, and his banker father. In 1950, after graduating from high school St Eunan's College (in) , he joined the Servite , a minor Catholic and went to the United States where he studied at Stonebridge Seminary, Lake Bluff , near Chicago in the Illinois and was ordained priest in 1957. He returned to Ireland where he obtained his doctorate in theology in 1959 at Maynooth College (fr) , the seminar National Ireland. He then studied two years the biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Having acquired this baggage, he returned to the seminary where he had been trained, and where he taught four years enabled him to "learn something finally on the Bible" in his own words After a year at the Seminary of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein , Illinois, and one year at the Catholic Theological Union (en) in Chicago, Crossan decided to abandon the priesthood. He gave as reasons for the time he wanted to have more freedom in his research, and getting married Career Crossan writes for both scholars and the general public. His two books are longer The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) and The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (1998). The two most popular books are short Crossan Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) and Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism In The Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (1995). In collaboration with archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed has also written a book on Jesus and another on Paul (2001, 2004), which allow to contextualize the lives of these two men and their times. With Robert Funk , Crossan was founded in 1985 the Jesus Seminar , a group of academics who study the " historical Jesus ". He held the position of co-president during the first decade of its existence. There is also a member of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). We saw a number of programs to Living the Questions, including Eclipsing Empire and First Light. Crossan suggests that Jesus was a " cynical Jew "illiterate, from a community of landless peasants, and was originally a disciple of John the Baptist. He was a healer and a man of great wisdom and great courage, who taught a message of welcome to others, tolerance, and liberation. "His strategy ... was to combine the healing and taking free meals together ... was going against the hierarchical and patron of the Jewish religion and Roman power ... He had nothing to sell and does not pose as mediator, but ... announced that nothing should stand between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself. . " By matching the testimony and studying the layers of ancient texts, Crossan came to the conclusion that many of the stories of the Gospel of Jesus are not statements of facts, including his miracles, the virgin birth and resurrection of Lazarus. By focusing on the small number of certificates and the lateness, it seems, the occurrence of miracles in the formation of the canon, Crossan opposes the idea that in early Christianity, Jesus would have had the reputation of being a powerful wizard, which would have posed significant problems not only for its enemies, but even his supporters, which could very soon began to remove the miracles of tradition. Crossan argues that the Gospels were never intended by their authors to be understood literally. He said the significance of history is the real issue is not whether this or that story is about Jesus of history or parable. He suggested that on a historical level, it is likely that, like all known victims of the crucifixions, but one of Jesus' body was abandoned to wild beasts, and not placed in a tomb . Crossan believes in the "resurrection" as an article of faith, but believes that the resurrection body has never been considered among the early Christians. He sees the removal of elected officials to Heaven at the Parousia a misreading of the First Epistle to the Thessalonians. The central axis of Crossan's methodology is the dating of texts. We find it more or less complete, in one of the appendices of The Historical Jesus. It is up to the year 50 AD a part of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas , and the first layer of the hypothetical Q Document (on this point is highly dependent on the work of John Kloppenborg). He also attributed part of the Gospel of Peter, he calls the "gospel of the Cross", to a date before the synoptic Gospels , reasoning in more detail in The Cross That Spoke: The Origin of the Passion Narratives. He believes that the "gospel of the cross" was the precursor of the passion narratives as found in the canonical Gospels. It does not ascend the synoptic below the mid-70s, beginning with the Gospel of Mark and ending with that of Luke , set in the 90s. As for the Gospel of John , he considers that part was developed in the early second century and the rest in the middle of the second. Following Rudolf Bultmann , he believes there is a "Signs Source" earlier, also for the gospel of John. His dating methods and conclusions are highly controversial, particularly as regards the dating of Thomas and the "gospel of the cross." The dating of these ancient non-canonical sources has not been accepted by all scholars of the Bible . In God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), Crossan takes as its starting point that the reader is supposed to be familiar with the key points of his earlier work on Jesus non-violent yet revolutionary, its motion for kingdom, and the surrounding matrix system of Roman imperial theology of religion, war, victory and peace, but he explains in the broader context of escalating violence that we see today in politics global popular culture. Within this matrix, he noted at the beginning of the book, that "there was a man living in the first century that has received the designations of" divine "," Son of God , "" God "and" God from God, "whose titles were" Lord, "" Redeemer, "" Liberator "and" Savior of the world. " Many Christians probably think that these titles were originally created for Christ and are applied only to him. But before Jesus ever existed, all those words belonged to Caesar Augustus. For Crossan, their adoption by early Christians to apply them to Jesus returning to refuse them to Caesar Augustus. "They took what was the identity of the emperor of Rome to give it to a Jewish peasant. Either it was a joke, or was for the Romans a crime of lese-majesty, what we call high treason . He ends the book by posing this question: "Is violence fueled by the Christian Bible supported or even instigated our imperial violence as the New Roman Empire? " Thesis and Methodology
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