In this revolutionary work, John Dominic Crossan reveals that the Passion and Resurrection Narratives in the four canonical Gospels are radical revisions of an earlier Gospel account. He argues boldly that the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, discovered in the grave of a Christian monk in Egypt circa 1886, contains the earliest version of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He describes how the authors of the four Gospels revised the early account of how their revision predominated as Roman authority grew. Lacking in the revision, he suggests, is the very heart of the earlier Passion: its depiction of Jesus' death as the consummation of Israel's pain and the resurrection as the vindication of Israel's faith.

Author - John Dominic Crossan

"A gifted writer—lucid, lively, and refreshingly frank. . . . Crossan combines mastery of the material and . . . amazing originality and ingenuity. His research has illuminated, from a new angle, the problem of the growth of the gospels."
—Morton Smith, professor emeritus of history and special lecturer in religion, Columbia University

"Crossan writes with the pen of angels and takes up the formidable task, requiring skill of heaven, of winning a fresh hearing for the extra-canonical Gospel of Peter. . . . Only a scholar of Crossan's perspicacity, independence of perspective, and capacity for persuasive argument could have framed and presented with such elegance this long-neglected Christian writing. No one who cares for the formative age of Western civilization and for the history of religion in that time will want to miss this masterpiece of scholarly with and intelligence."
—Jacob Neusner, Underleider Distinguished Scholar of Judaic Studies, Brown University

In Fragments by John Dominic Crossan
The Essential Jesus by John Dominic Crossan
Cliffs of Fall by John Dominic Crossan
Four Other Gospels by John Dominic Crossan
Sayings Parallels by John Dominic Crossan
Finding Is the First Act by John Dominic Crossan
Raid on the Articulate by John Dominic Crossan