Join host Edouard Tahmizian in this half-hour return interview with esteemed Jesus Seminar scholar John Dominic Crossan as they canvass Crossan's thoughts on the 50s-60s CE Q source, why Crossan thinks that the later apocryphal Gospel of Thomas is reflective of an earlier oral tradition (e.g., the fact that roughly one-third of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas are also in Q, in different orders, suggesting a common 40s CE oral tradition informing both), how this hypothesized oral tradition approaches the earliest writings of Paul (30s CE), and what Crossan takes to be a good example of an authentic saying of Jesus (namely, the parable that God's kingdom on Earth is like a mustard seed, which is found in Q, Mark, and Thomas). Tune in for this fantastic interview with a leading biblical scholar about historians' attempts to reconstruct the origins of the Gospels!
In this half-hour follow-up interview with biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan about his just released book Render Unto Caesar: The Struggle Over Christ and Culture in the New Testament, host Edouard Tahmizian queries Crossan about what it meant for first-century Christians to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." Crossan explains why he reads the Gospels as being constituted by parables that were originally composed in order to emphasize the points that the Gospel-depicted Jesus wanted to really drive home to his followers (e.g., that not all Samaritans are bad in the parable of the Good Samaritan), the idea being that a parable puts the mental work of thinking about the moral of a story on to the listener, forcing him/her to really engage an issue rather than simply passively register it. In the ancient world, Crossan explains, the penalty for failing to solve a riddle was standardly depicted as death (because getting the facts wrong can produce irrevocable catastrophic consequences); so likewise in the Gospels, the failure to understand a parable could cost a person his/her salvation from Hell. They also canvass how the medieval misunderstanding of the literal/metaphorical distinction led to outlandish readings of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whether or not Jesus (or Paul) 'predicted' that the end of days would occur in the disciples' lifetimes, and much more! Check out this fantastic interview with a world-class biblical scholar framing a lot of these issues from a fascinating perspective!
In this roughly hour-long interview with leading biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, host Edouard Tahmizian delves into Crossan’s intriguing exploration of how Paul recast the Judaic concept of a general resurrection at the end of time as process that occurs through time, the obscenity of the notion that God oversaw Jesus’ murder so that Jesus could take the punishment for our sins to absolve us from having to receive it, what higher criticism has revealed about the use of “artistic license” in the composition of the canonical Gospels, and whether Jesus was one of many contemporaneous leaders experimenting with nonviolent resistance in response to Roman rule. Check out this intriguing interview with a world-class scholar on all of these issues and more!
