John Dominic Crossan (born 17 February 1934) is an Irish-American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity and former Catholic priest who was a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, and emeritus professor at DePaul University.

[1] In place of the eschatological message of the Gospels, Crossan emphasizes the historical context of Jesus and of his followers immediately after his death.

[1] He describes Jesus' ministry as founded on free healing and communal meals, negating the social hierarchies of Jewish culture and the Roman Empire.

Though his father was a banker, Crossan was steeped in rural Irish life, which he experienced through frequent visits to the home of his paternal grandparents.

Upon graduation from St Eunan's College, a boarding high school, in 1950, Crossan joined the Servites, a Catholic religious order, and moved to the United States.

Crossan returned to Ireland, where he earned his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1959 at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, the Irish national seminary.

In 1965, while studying at the Ecole Biblique in Jordanian East Jerusalem, he travelled through several countries in the region, escaping just days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War of 1967.

He dates part of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas to the 50s AD, as well as the first layer of the hypothetical Q Document (in this he is heavily dependent on the work of John Kloppenborg).

[4] In God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), Crossan assumes that the reader is familiar with key points from his earlier work on the nonviolent revolutionary Jesus, his Kingdom movement, and the surrounding matrix of the Roman imperial theological system of religion, war, victory, peace, but discusses them in the broader context of the escalating violence in world politics and popular culture of today.

At the end of the book, Crossan states "I conclude that Jesus really existed, that we can know the significant sequence of his life...but that he comes to us trailing clouds of fiction, parables by him and about him, particular incidents as miniparables and whole gospels as megaparables.

"[9] His contemporary and fellow faith-focused academic Ben Witherington III called Crossan's thesis "a category mistake".