Homebrewed Christianity Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us? with John Dominic Crossan
Jordan Baptism Reenacted National Return Ritual
- John's baptism used Jordan crossing as a reenactment of Israel's exodus/return-from-exile to ritualize collective repentance.
- Crossan emphasizes the embodied communal ritual pushed people to act rather than passively wait for God.
Organize Collectively Not Just Individually
- Organize resistance collectively rather than expecting individual spiritual practices to change systems.
- Crossan stresses that tiny peoples survived via communal laws and organized movements, not isolated interior spirituality.
Taunts Reveal Fast Versus Feast Theologies
- Taunts that John has a demon and Jesus is a glutton reveal historical practice differences: John fasts in expectation, Jesus feasts in celebration.
- Crossan reads these insults as evidence that John expected divine advent while Jesus proclaimed God's present help.
In this second live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom works through nearly 40 questions from the more than 2,000 people in the class — and Dom is, as promised, brief. The conversation moves from Cyrus and the economic disruption of Roman Galilee, to the misplaced colon in Isaiah 40 that quietly rewrote John the Baptist's identity, to why Mark borrowed a Roman horror story about a prostitute at a banquet to tell the story of John's execution. Dom defends his claim that Jesus underwent a genuine conversion after John's death — bigger than Paul's, he says, because it involved a different vision of God entirely — and insists that the apocalyptic tradition of waiting for God to intervene is not just a theological mistake but, after 2,000 years, edges toward something harsher than delusion. As always, Dom leaves you with more to think about than when you started. To join the class and get access to all four visual lectures, head to CrossanClass.com.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
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, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
- A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
- From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
- Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
- Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance
- Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization
- Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts
- Paul & Thecla
- Ask JC Anything
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