Jesus: History, Theology, and Evolution

Due to intellectual property and copyright limitations, these lectures will only be available live via Zoom. They will not be livestreamed or recorded for later viewing.

John Dominic Crossan, Palmyra, Syria – 04/30/2010

Theme
Theology is the transcendental interpretation of history but how does any such reading intersect with human evolution? We will address this question by focusing on Jesus’ life, his message then and now as we explore the following topics:

Lecture 1: The World of Jesus
April 22, 2021
Before Jesus ever existed, and even if he never had, there was in the Mediterranean world from the 30s BCE onwards a human being whose titles were: Lord, Son of God, Divine, Savior of the World, and Redeemer from Sin. What could it possibly mean to take those titles from a victorious emperor on the Palatine Hill in Rome and give them to a peasant laborer from the Nazareth Ridge in Galilee?
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Lecture 2: The Vision of Jesus
April 29, 2021
Why did Jesus happen when and where he happened? Why did the Divine-Rule movement of Jesus and the Jordan-Baptism movement of John arise in the territories of Herod Antipas in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas do then and there that created those oppositions – after a quiet rule of 25 years? Why, at that time, did Jesus leave inland Nazareth to dwell at lakeside Capernaum (Matthew 4:13).
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Lecture 3: The Execution of Jesus
May 6, 2021
If Jesus went regularly to Jerusalem for Passover, what happened differently that last and fateful time; if Jesus only went that one time, why did he do so then? Why was Jesus legally and publicly executed by Pilate but none of his closest followers was either arrested or even questioned? Was Jesus executed for violent or nonviolent revolution against Roman law and order?
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Lecture 4: The Resurrection of Jesus
May 13, 2021
Why does western Christianity have an individual Resurrection for Jesus alone but Eastern Christianity have a universal Resurrection for Jesus and the whole human race – represented by and incarnated in Adam and Eve? Should that profound divergence between those two mega-metaphors for Easter be combined for the future of our common Christianity? Also, can Christian Easter change Human Evolution?
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Join us in a probing exploration of the meaning of Jesus’ life as interpreted over the centuries in both Eastern and Western traditions, and as we re-discover Jesus’ teaching in today’s world.

Leader(s)

John Dominic Crossan is an Irish-American biblical scholar with two-year post-doctoral diplomas in exegesis from Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and in archeology from Jerusalem’s École Biblique. He has been a mendicant friar and a catholic priest, a Co-Chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a President of the Society of Biblical Literature. His focus, whether scholarly or popular, whether in books, videos, or lectures, is on the historical Jesus as the norm and criterion for the entire Christian Bible. His reconstructed Jesus incarnates nonviolent resistance to the Romanization of his Jewish homeland and the Herodian commercialization of his Galilean lake as present program and future hope of a transformed world and transfigured earth. Crossan’s method is to situate biblical texts within the reconstructed matrix of their own their own genre and purpose, their own time and place, and to hear them accurately for then before accepting or rejecting them for now.

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