The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown -- while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism -- never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as Did Jesus die for our sins? and Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection? Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith.
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With his work on Jesus, Crossan joins the ranks of the truly great biblical scholars of the twentieth century. --Robert W. Funk, editor of The Five Gospels and founder of the Jesus Seminar
Crossan paints his Jesus with great warmth and power. He achieves a portrait that both takes in the contemporary background yet accounts for Jesus' distinctiveness. --New York Times Book Review
This is an extremely interesting, erudite, informative, must-read for anyone interested in the New Testament. Read it. --National Catholic Reporter
Crossan paints his Jesus with great warmth and power. He achieves a portrait that both takes in the contemporary background yet accounts for Jesus' distinctiveness. --New York Times Book Review
This is an extremely interesting, erudite, informative, must-read for anyone interested in the New Testament. Read it. --National Catholic Reporter
About the Author
John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus and Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
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brother of Jesus who was called the Christ." Read the first page
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
A riveting and much needed book! Analyzes religious propaganda which was included in the New Testament by the early Christian church in which the Jews are blamed for the execution of Jesus. Crossan shows how that this did not really matter at the time, because Christianity was just a bunch of disconnected movements without much power. But after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, these passages were used in programs of Jewish extermination. The Nazi Holocaust was built on this Christian foundation.
6 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
John Dominic Crossan multiplies his works by mutating one scholarly volume into several "popular" spinoffs, including the present work. The problem with "Who Killed Jesus?" is that, despite its title, which promises an enthralling true-life mystery, the book fails as a "popular" work. Crossan proposes in his introduction to answer another scholarly work, which he finds too sympathetic to the theory of historical origin for the Gospels, by pointing out that many of the incidents involving the death and resurrection of Jesus are really adaptations of Old Testament prophecy. Such an "answer" is perfectly suited to an essay in a scholarly journal, but certainly not to a monograph intended for the "masses". Moreover, as in most Crossan texts, the author quotes long, undigested passages from his sources, which is quite tedious to the general reader. As to the content of the volume, the case for the composition of the gospels based on Old Testament prophecy has been made succinctly, and quite disturbingly, by other modern, liberal NT scholars, (even though they cannot explain how, if the prophecies are the source of fictions about Jesus, they are more clearly "plagiarized" in Matthew than in Mark, although Matthew is agreed to be the later author), but in the present volume, this thesis is mired in polimics and is further bogged down in Crossan's premise that an early version of the second-century Gospel of Peter fragment is the source of the canonical gospel narratives. I ask again: "Why write this book?"
4 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
My education at UCLA wasn't all that good. Much of what the professors taught as "stable, reliable, scientific facts" have subsiquently turned out to be incorrect. The one thing I did learn was a love for logic. I learned how to spot fallacious reasoning, unwarrented jumps (nonsequitors), and best of all ***unsubstantiated asumptions***. This book is really a collection of the last two items. I was truly disapointed by the number of suspect assumptions made by the author, and the enormous conclusions derived from these assumptions. Basically, to accept his argument, you must accept the proposition that (A) the gospels are only propoganda for Christianity, and (B) therefore contain little factual value. If you do not accept (A) or (B) the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. Moreover, to love this work, you must believe that a historical fact should be erased from the record if it is dangerous to any one group of people. This is the historical revisionist argument wrapped in sympathy.
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