The Lyons Lecture Series hosts John Dominic Crossan. Crossan is a celebrated lecturer and writer from the Jesus Seminar. His Irish accent and love for story telling endears the audience while his scholarship wins them. Born in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, in 1934, Crossan served the Catholic Church as an ordained priest from 1957 to 1969 when he joined DePaul University, Chicago. He remained in Chicago until 1995. He is now a Professor Emeritus in its Department of Religious Studies. In the last forty years, Crossan has written twenty-five 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). He has lectured to lay and scholarly audiences

Ticket cost and transportation will be announced when established.

Information will be made available well ahead of the registration deadline of April 1, 2012.

Saturday, April 14

Sponsor: First United Methodist Church, Madison, WI

Registration Deadline: Sunday, April 1, 2012

Leader: John Dominic Crossan,

contact the church office, 715-834-2668

Cost: TBA