The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set Quotes

“This is my working definition of history: History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. There are times we can get only alternative perspectives on the same event. (There are always alternative perspectives, even when we do not hear them.) But history as argued public reconstruction is necessary to reconstruct our past in order to project our future.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus

“I need electricity to charge my computer, which is, by the way, an Apple Macintosh, which I chose initially because the Bible proclaims that “those who look through the windows see dimly” (Eccl. 12:3).”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus

“Perhaps illiterate people have particularly good memories to compensate for being unable to write things down, just as the blind are popularly believed to have especially keen ears or sensitive fingers. Such arguments must be rejected…. And while it would be logically possible to argue that literacy and schooling make memory worse, the fact of the matter is that they don’t. On the contrary: cross-cultural studies have generally found a positive relation between schooling and memory…. Skilled performances by oral poets are found only in nonliterate societies because the concept of poetry itself changes when literacy appears…. Literal, verbatim memory does exist, nevertheless. It makes its appearance whenever a performance is defined by fidelity to a particular text. Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed, pp. 241–242”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus

“Augustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and human conjunction of Apollo and Atia. How does the historian respond to that story? Are there any who take it literally or even bracket its transcendental claims as beyond historical judgment or empirical test? Classical historians, no matter how religious, do not usually do so. That divergence raises an ethical problem for me. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augustus and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and miraculously or all of them should be accepted metaphorically and theologically. It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one’s own story. This, then,”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus

“The good news, for Luke-Acts, is that the Holy Spirit moved headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome. The Holy Spirit, apparently, did not cross the Euphrates to the north or the Nile to the south but only the Mediterranean to the west. Each of those twin volumes, and one no more or less than the other, is theology rather than history. It is our problem if we wanted journalism. We received gospel instead.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus

“The problem is that, slowly but surely across the past two hundred years of scholarly research, we have learned that the gospels are exactly what they openly and honestly claim they are. They are not history, though they contain history. They are not biography, though they contain biography. They are gospel—that is, good news. Good indicates that the news is seen from somebody’s point of view—from, for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation.”
― John Dominic Crossan, The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set: Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Birth of Christianity, The Power of Parable, and The Greatest Prayer – Four Complete Works on Historical Jesus