(3) The Birth of Christianity: John Dominic Crossan

Is my search for the historical Jesus a threat to faith? Or does it help make faith a possibility for modern men and women?

Actually, that headline writer got it wrong. My purpose was to try to understand the stories of Jesus, not refute them. The title of my speech that evening was simply "What I've Learned from 35 Years of Searching for the Historical Jesus." And that is also what this book is about. It is an invitation to journey back in time with me to see Jesus in his own setting in the first century Jewish homeland. But before we begin, let me tell you a bit about myself and how I got involved in this search . . . .




I grew up in small towns in Ireland. In 1950, at the age of sixteen, I entered the Servites, a Roman Catholic monastic order founded in the thirteenth century. That was the century when St. Thomas Aquinas combined Aristotle's philosophy with Catholic theology, and never worried that one might contradict the other. Reason and revelation, he insisted, were twin gifts from the same God, and could not be in conflict - unless we misunderstood one or both of them.

That same conviction was deeply embedded in my own heart when, after six years of studying philosophy and theology, I was ordained a priest in 1957. My priestly life was spent more in the library than the parish, and included years of advanced study at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and the French School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. As a priest, I taught in a number of colleges, universities and seminaries in the Chicago area.

In 1969 I asked for and received permission to leave the priesthood and the Servite Order. I left primarily in order to marry, but also to avoid a conflict of interest between priestly loyalty and scholarly honesty. The official letter of permission from the Vatican was dated July 4th - which I considered rather appropriate. Did I leave with feelings of resentment and anger toward the Church? No. While I was a monk and a priest, I was quite happy. When I was no longer happy, I left. It was that simple. Some others have been badly hurt in such transitions; I was not.

From those years in that medieval Order I have retained three rather medieval gifts. The first is my name: John is my civil name, and Dominic the new name given me when I entered the Servites. The second is a profound conviction that faith and fact, revelation and reason cannot contradict one another, unless the human mind has misunderstood either or both. The third gift is a very great love for Gregorian Chant, which I sang badly enough to ruin whole choirs and for whose survival my departure was probably a public service.

After leaving the priesthood in 1969, I joined the faculty of DePaul University in Chicago, remaining there until my retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1995. Since I have been a religiously controversial figure, that long tenure is a tribute to DePaul's courage and integrity.

When I joined DePaul, I needed to choose a research focus. Since at the seminary I had been teaching courses on the parables of Jesus, and on the resurrection stories, I decided to concentrate on the historical Jesus. Year after year I researched and published on particular aspects of Jesus as seen in his own historical context. Indeed, I am probably the only scholar in the world who has spent an entire lifetime on the search for the historical Jesus.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• jesus
• scholar
• bible
• history
• historical
• gospel
• gospels
• rome
• god
• empire
• christianity
• john
• dominic
• crossan
• theology
• catholic
• university
• priest
• pastor
• ministry
• christian
• atheist
• yt:stretch=16:9
• church
• philosophy
• jesus christ
• praise
• preaching
• prophecy
• worship