John Dominic Crossan (born 17 February 1934) is an Irish-American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, former Catholic priest who was a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, and emeritus professor at DePaul University. His research has focused on the historical Jesus, the theology of noncanonical Gospels, and the application of postmodern hermeneutical approaches to the Bible.
His work is controversial, portraying the Second Coming as a late corruption of Jesus' message and saying that Jesus' divinity is metaphorical.
In place of the eschatological message of the Gospels, Crossan emphasizes the historical context of Jesus and of his followers immediately after his death. 
He describes Jesus' ministry as founded on free healing and communal meals, negating the social hierarchies of Jewish culture and the Roman Empire.

Crossan is a major scholar in contemporary historical Jesus research.
In particular, he and Burton Mack advocated for a non-eschatological view of Jesus, a view that contradicts the more common view that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher.
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. The very early dating of these non-canonical sources is not accepted by the majority of biblical scholars.

Life
Crossan was born on 17 February  1934, in Nenagh, 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 from St Eunan's College, a boarding high school, in 1950, Crossan joined the Servites, a Catholic religious order, and moved to the United States. He was trained at Stonebridge Seminary, Lake Bluff, Illinois, then ordained a priest in 1957. Crossan returned to Ireland, where he earned his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1959 at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the Irish national seminary. He then completed two more years of study in biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. In 1965, while studying at the Ecole Biblique in Jordanian East Jerusalem, he travelled through several countries in the region, escaping just days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War of 1967.

After a year at St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois, and a year at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Crossan chose to resign his priesthood. In the fall of 1969 he joined the faculty of DePaul University, where he taught undergraduates comparative religion for 26 years until retiring in 1995. With Robert W. Funk, Crossan served as cochair of the Jesus Seminar, a group of academics studying the historical Jesus, for its first decade. Crossan also served as president of the Chicago Society of Biblical Research in 1978–1979, and as president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2012.

Crossan married Margaret Dagenais, a professor at Loyola University Chicago in the summer of 1969. She died in 1983 due to a heart 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.

Views and methodology
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."

Central to Crossan's methodology is the dating of texts. This is laid out more or less fully in The Historical Jesus in one of the appendices. He dates part of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas to the 50s CE, as well as the first layer of the hypothetical Q Document (in this he is heavily dependent on the work of John Kloppenborg). He also assigns a portion of the Gospel of Peter, which he calls the "Cross Gospel", to a date preceding the synoptic gospels, the reasoning of which is laid out more fully in The Cross that Spoke: The Origin of the Passion Narratives. He believes the "Cross Gospel" was the forerunner to the passion narratives in the canonical gospels. He does not date the synoptics until the mid to late 70s CE, starting with the Gospel of Mark and ending with Luke in the 90s. As for the Gospel of John, he believes part was constructed at the beginning, and another part closer to the middle, of the 2nd century CE. Following Rudolf Bultmann, he believes there is an earlier "Signs Source" for John as well. His dating methods and conclusions are quite controversial, particularly regarding the dating of Thomas and the "Cross Gospel".

In God 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 of religion, 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 to Caesar Augustus." 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 called majestas and we call high treason."

In Who 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.

In The 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." His contemporary and fellow faith-focused academic Ben Witherington III called Crossan's thesis "a category mistake".

Works

Books

Edited by

Journal articles

References

External links

1934 births
Living people
20th-century biblical scholars
Alumni of St Patrick's College, Maynooth
American biblical scholars
American Christian writers
Christian radicals
Critics of the Christ myth theory
DePaul University faculty
Irish biblical scholars
Irish Christians
Irish emigrants to the United States
Members of the Jesus Seminar
New Testament scholars
People educated at St Eunan's College
People from Nenagh
Pontifical Biblical Institute alumni
Religious naturalists
Former members of Catholic religious institutes
Presidents of the Society of Biblical Literature
존 도미니크 크로산(, 1934년-)은 아일랜드 태생으로 포스트모던 신학을 주장하는 로마 가톨릭 교회 출신 신학자로 현재는 천주교에서 벗어난 진보적 신학자로 신약성서신학 분야의 신학자이다.

생애와 활동 
존 도미니크 크로산은 아일랜드에서 태어났으며 1950년대 세인트 유넌 칼리지(St. Eunan's College)를 졸업한 후 미국으로 이주해 세인트 패트릭스 칼리지에서 박사 학위(Doctorate of Divinity)를 받았다. 이후 1959년부터 1961년까지 로마의 로마교황청 성서연구소(Pontifical Biblical Institute), 1965년부터 1967년까지 예루살렘에 있는 성서 연구소(The École biblique)에서 박사 후 과정(post-doctoral research)을 보냈다.

1950년부터 1969년까지 마리아의 종 수도회Ordo Servorum Mariae의 수도사였으며 1957년부터 1969년까지 천주교 사제로 지냈으나 학문과 결혼의 자유를 얻기 위해 천주교회 사제직을 사임하였다. 1969년 시카고의 로욜라 대학교 교수였던 마가렛 더게너이스(Margaret Dagenais)와 결혼했으며 1983년 부인과 사별한 뒤 사회운동가인 사라 세스턴Sarah Sexton과 1986년 재혼하였다. 1969년부터 1995년까지 드폴 대학교의 교수로 활동했다. 현재는 드폴 대학교 종교학과 명예교수로 있다.

예수 세미나 공동 대표(1985-1996), 미국 성서학회 역사적 예수분과 의장(1993-1998)을 지냈으며 2012년에는 미국 성서학회 회장으로 활동했다. 신약성서의 본문비평(Texual Critism), 역사적 예수, 성서 고고학(biblical archaeology), 인류학의 권위자로 인정받고 있다.

존 도미니크 크로산 저서 목록 
 Scanning the Sunday Gospel (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1966)
 The Gospel of Eternal Life (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1967)
 In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus (New York : Harper & Row, 1973(reprinted 1992))
 The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story (Argus Communications, 1975(reprinted 1988) 『어두운 간격』(이대성 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2009)
 Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York : Harper & Row, 1976)
 Finding Is the First Act: Trove Folktales and Jesus' Treasure Parable (Scholars Press, 1979)
 Cliffs of Fall: Paradox and Polyvalence in the Parables of Jesus (New York: Seabury Press, 1980)
 A Fragile Craft: The Work of Amos Niven Wilder (Scholars Press, 1981)
 In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983)
 Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985)
 Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the Jesus Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986)
 The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (New York: Harper & Row, 1988)
 The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991) 『역사적 예수』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2012)
 The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1994(reprinted 1998))
 Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (New York: HarperONe, 1994) 『예수』(김기철 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2007)
 Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (New York: HarperONe, 1995)
 Who Is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions about the Historical Jesus 리처드 왓츠Richard Watts와 편집 (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996) 『예수는 누구인가』(한인철 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 1998)
 The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (New York: HarperONe, 1998)
 Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan 윌리엄 레인 크레이그William Lane Craig, 마커스 보그와 공저 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998)
 The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conflict 루크 티모시 존슨Luke Timothy Johnson, 베르너 H.켈버Werner H. Kelber와 공저 (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 1999)
 A Long Way from Tipperary: A Memoir (New York: HarperONe, 2000)
 Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts 조너선 리드Jonathan L. Reed와 공저 (New York: HarperONe, 2001) 『예수의 역사』(김기철 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2010)
 In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom 조너선 리드Jonathan L. Reed와 공저 (New York: HarperONe, 2004)
 The Last Week: A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus's Final Week in Jerusalem 마커스 보그와 공저 (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2006) 『마지막 일주일』(오희천 옮김, 다산초당, 2012)
 God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2007) 『하나님과 제국』(이종욱 옮김, 포이에마, 2010)
 The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus' Birth 마커스 보그와 공저 (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2007) 『첫 번째 크리스마스』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2011)
 The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon 마커스 보그와 공저 (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2009) 『첫 번째 바울의 복음』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2010)
 The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of The Lord's Prayer (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2010) 『가장 위대한 기도』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2011)
 The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus became fiction about Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2012) 『비유의 위력』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2012)
 How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation (San Francisco: HarperOne ,2015) 『성경을 어떻게 읽어야 참 그리스도인이 되는가』(김준우 옮김, 한국기독교연구소, 2015)

관련문서 
 역사적 예수

각주 

1934년 출생
살아있는 사람
미국의 신학자
아일랜드계 미국인
성서학자