LEXINGTON, Ky.—John Dominic Crossan, noted author and expert on issues of privilege, oppression and social inequality, will speak at Transylvania University’s Haggin Auditorium Wednesday, Feb. 4, at 7:30 p.m. The lecture, “Finding Jesus: His Matrix and His Message,” is free and open to the public.
Crossan, an authority on historical Jesus and First Century Christianity, writes books for both academic and popular audiences. His two lengthiest books are 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).
Two of Crossan’s briefer popular books are 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). Crossan has also co-authored a book about Jesus and another about Paul with archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2001, 2004), which provide contextualization of the lives and times of these two men. His latest book (2007) is God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome Then and Now.
In all, he has written 23 books, five of which were national religious bestsellers for a combined total of 22 months. His work has been translated into 11 languages, including Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
The distinguished New Testament scholar has lectured to lay and scholarly audiences across the U.S. and around the world. He has been interviewed on 200 radio stations and on such television programs as ABC’s PrimeTime and Nightline, CBS’ Early Show and 48 Hours, NBC’s Dateline and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor.
Crossan was a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars working to evaluate the historical significance of every shred of evidence about Jesus, trying to ascertain what Jesus actually said and did. He was chair of the Parables Seminar, editor of Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism and chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature.
A native of Ireland, Crossan received a doctorate in divinity from Maynooth College and did post-doctoral research at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Servites, a thirteenth-century Roman Catholic religious order, from 1950-69, and an ordained priest from 1957-69. He was a professor at DePaul University, Chicago, from 1969-95 and is currently a professor emeritus in its religious studies department.
The lecture is sponsored by the Lilly Project at Transylvania and funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. For more information, contact the public relations office at (859) 233-8120 or the Lilly Project at (859) 281-3569.