FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18 | 7:00pm

The Meaning and Challenge of Resurrection
with John Dominic Crossan

All the major events in Jesus’ life are directly described in the Gospels—for creative portrayal in artistic images. All events except for the most important one of them all—the Resurrection itself— which is only described indirectly by its results in the Empty-Tomb tradition and its effects in the Risen-Vision tradition.

This absence allowed the artistic creation of two very different direct images of the Resurrection—the Individual Tradition of Jesus arising alone in the Western Tradi-tion and the Universal Tradition of Jesus arising and raising with him All-Humanity represented by Adam-and-Eve.

Which of those two Resurrection Traditions is in closer continuity with the East-er vision of the New Testament? What does Christian Easter have to do with human evolution—especially with civilization’s escalatory-violence since the Neolithic or Agri-cultural Revolution as summarized in Genesis 4?

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John Dominic Crossan is an Irish-American biblical scholar with 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.