The Essential Jesus

After his definitive The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan delivered Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography--a popularized, bestselling account of what we can know about the life of Jesus. Here he offers the core of his life's work--a concise and astonishing presentation of the authentic teachings and earliest images of the revolutionary Galilean sage. Crossan's fresh translations of Jesus' sayings show Jesus to be a teacher whose radical message that all are equal before God is as timely today as it was two thousand years ago. This picture is dramatically confirmed by the preConstantinian, Christian renderings of Jesus, which show that he was remembered by the first Christians not as God but as a revolutionary healer and leader.

""Another triumph in inimitable Crossan style. The wedding of words and images is a powerful new approach to the historical Jesus. A dramatic conclusion to a trilogy that opens a new epoch in the quest of the historical Jesus.""
--Robert W. Funk, author of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Worlds of Jesus

""I continue to be a fan of John Dominic Crossan's work. His presentation of Jesus's sayings in The Essential Jesus has his typical erudition and his readable style; when you add the illustrations it makes for an unusually informative and useful book.""
--Harvey Cox, Harvard University

""The Essential Jesus pictures the religious dream and social program of the historical Jesus. Like an archival video, this fascinating book leads us back to the original voice of Jesus.""
--Uta Ranke-Heinemann, author of Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven and Putting Away Childish Things

John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University, Chicago. He has written twenty books on the historical Jesus in the last thirty years, four of which have become national religious bestsellers: The Historical Jesus (1991), Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994), Who Killed Jesus? (1995), and The Birth of Christianity (1998). He is a former co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, and a former chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association for biblical study based in the United States.