Presenters

Marcus Borg

Always a popular presenter at The Center, Marcus Borg is Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University and author of The Heart of Christianity. His many best-selling books include: Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, the best-selling book by a contemporary Jesus scholar; The God We Never Knew, named as one of "ten best books in religion for 1997; The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (with N. T. Wright); Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teaching & Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary; The Last Week: A Day by Day Account of Jesus’ Final Week in Jerusalem co-authored with John Dominic Crossan; and his most recent collaboration with Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus' Birth .

He was an active member of the Jesus Seminar and has been chair of the Historical Jesus section of the Society of Biblical Literature. He has been national chair of the Historical Jesus Section of the Society of Biblical Literature, co-chair of its International New Testament Program Committee, and president of the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. His books have been translated into seven languages, and he has lectured widely throughout North America, including the Chautauqua and Smithsonian Institutions, and overseas (England, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Hungary, Israel, and South Africa).

John Dominic Crossan

John Dominic Crossan is Professor Emeritus in its Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago and was Co-Chair of the Jesus Seminar from 1985 to 1996, was Chair of the Parables Seminar in 1972-76, Editor of Semeia. An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism in 1980-86, and Chair of the Historical Jesus Section in 1993-1998, within the Society of Biblical Literature, an international scholarly association for biblical study based in the United States.

In the last thirty-five years he has written twenty-three books on the historical Jesus, earliest Christianity, and the historical Paul. Five of them have been national religious bestsellers for a combined total of twenty-four months. The scholarly core of his work is the trilogy from The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991) through The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (1998), to In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom, co-authored with the archaeologist Jonathan L. Reed (2004). His next book, God & Empire, Jesus Against Rome Then and Now, will be published by HarperSanFrancisco in February 2007. His work has also been translated into eleven foreign languages, including Korean, Chinese, and Japanese.

He has lectured to lay and scholarly audiences across the United States as well as in Ireland and England, Scandinavia and Finland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and Japan. He has been interviewed on 200 radio stations, including four times on NPR’s “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. He has also been interviewed on television networks such as ABC’s PrimeTime, Peter Jennings Reporting, and Nightline, CBS’ Early Show and 48 Hours, NBC’s Dateline, and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, and on cable programs such as A&E, History, Discovery, and the National Geographic Channel.