Episode Details

John Dominic Crossan returns to the podcast to discuss the presence of empire throughout scripture and how recognizing the divine struggle against its oppression can reframe our understanding of Easter then and today. In the conversation, we mention some Dom’s books, including The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now and How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Is God Violent? An Exploration from Genesis to Revelation.

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, 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 future hope of a transformed world and transfigured earth. Crossan’s method is to situate biblical texts within the reconstructed matrix of their own genre and purpose, their own time and place, and to hear them accurately for then before accepting or rejecting them for now.

• The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ
• The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God
• How to think about Jesus like a Historian
• the Last Week of Jesus’ Life
• Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions
• Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories
• the most important discovery for understanding Jesus
• The Bible, Violence, & Our Future
• Resurrecting Easter
• on the First Christmas
•  From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God 
• Render Unto Caesar
• on God & Empire