Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant

This book opens with "The Gospel of Jesus," Crossan's determination of Jesus' actual words and actions stripped of any subsequent additions and placed in a capsule account of his life story. The Jesus who emerges is a savvy and courageous Jewish Mediterranean peasant, a radical social revolutionary, with a rhapsodic vision of economic, political, and religious egalitarianism and a social program for creating it. John Dominic Crossan claims that Jesus is actually one of the best documented figures in ancient history; the challenge is the complexity of the sources. The portrayal of Jesus that emerges from Crossan's methodology combines the complementary disciplines of social anthropology, Greco-Roman history, and the literary analysis of specific pronouncements anecdotes, confessions andinterpretations involving Jesus.
John Dominic Crossan is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar.