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A Long Way from Tipperary: What a Former Monk Discovered in His Search for the Truth

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First, I will share my bias. I like, respect and enjoy both the person and the works of John Dominic Crossan; having discovered the former a couple of years ago by chance and good fortune, and the latter in 1993 by way of his seminal work: Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. It has been, therefore, with great anticipation that I have awaited this memoir and, as the old saw goes, it was definitely worth the wait. It was a one sitting read and this autobiography of one of the world's preeminent scholars on the Historical Jesus and early Christianity will be read again, recommended to all and assume a cherished place upon the bookshelf.

I laughed (often aloud), teared-up (some would say cried), and more than once re-read a sentence or a page to ensure I left nothing undigested as there is much here to savor (prose that borders on poetry); much here to ponder ("What is the character of your God?"); and much here to entertain (The consequences of literally interpreting every passage in the Bible... "If Jesus is the Lamb of God, did Mary have a little lamb?").

In reading this memoir no one can deny that Professor Crossan has had anything but a life well lived (thanks in no small measure to a wonderful lady named Sarah) and for the reader who puts down a schilling and opens this book he will, no doubt, have his spirit enobled, his heart warmed and his mind enlightened....and thoroughly enjoy himself throughout the process. What else could one ask from a book?

May the fates smile upon us and allow many many more years of (and thousands of more words from) John Dominic Crossan. He has, indeed, come a long way from Tipperary and I, for one, am thankful that his journey and mine have crossed paths; for in doing so my life has been profoundly enriched.

Crossan writes an intellectual biography that walks through many twists and turns in his life. But unlike other theological books it has a dramatic aspect. He first places in context criticisms of his views of the historical Jesus, and asks, in essence: How did I get there? What brought me to this point in my career? In the process of reading his memoir we read about various influences in his life, both personal and academic, as well as his methodology. It is a glimpse into the person of Crossan even as he wants us to glimpse into the person of Jesus. Admittedly, his views are not as elaborately explained as they are in his other works, so don't read this book if that is your goal. But if you want a book on the life of ideas and the life of a unique theologian, this book will be anything but dry.

Crossan is far better a scholar (brilliantly incisive) than an autobiographer. The facts are here, but quite often the tone tends to be flat. To be sure, there are entertaining anecdotes and opportunities to make additions to one's own list of quotable Crossanisms (see what he says about guilt!), but Crossan is often quite guarded in revealing his emotions. Many of Crossan's readers, I think, are most interested in what the crisis was that led him to leave the priesthood, but the reader will find no anguish, no dark night of the soul here-(was the problem really just intellectual freedom?). The only anxiety expressed is about finding subsequent employment. Nor does one really know how Crossan's researches have affected his spirtuality- much of C's agenda in popularizing his scholarly work is to promote a revivified Christianity. Crossan has shown us a Jesus who is a radical egalitarian; who are the people who surround Crossan at his table, academics, yes, but who else? Rather than fulminating against fundamentalist types who are trying to promote God's vengeance on the wicked in his final chapter (already a cliche among writers on religion), Crossan might have told us how his work contributed to forming his personal views on social justice. An interview by a skillful journalist could pose the questions that Crossan doesn't ask or eludes answering in his autobiography. There needs to be one.

As a theologian, Crossan's contributions to the birth of Christianity have had a significant intellectual and spiritual impact on me. Indeed, more than an priest in recent times, what he has written and the way he has approached subject have brought me back to my core beliefs. I was, therefore, intrigued to read his memoir. The memoir was quite disjointed, a fact I found a disappointing indication that the various phases of his life have not become integrated for him, but, instead, a series of disjointed phases held together by his boundless exuberance, curiosity, and adventurousness. As a reader, one of the things I ask a memoirist to be is honest, and in explaining his reasons for leaving monastic life and the priesthood, reasons I will not discuss for fear of ruining the read for others, is I think brutally honest. Being American, but having being educated some 15 years later in one of the finest convent girl's schools in Ireland, I can assure the readers of the excellence of the education and the harshness of the life. The "private school" education in no way compares with that of life in England's public school's, or the US's private schools, but the educational opportunities are excellent. I was shocked to read that academics and theologians who oppose his views on the historical Jesus dismiss him as an Irish "peasant." This speaks to the kind of arrogance I experienced upon returning from Ireland in the middle of my junior year in high school and being told that, because I'd been educated in a "third world" country, I would have to take remedial courses. It turned out to be quite the opposite. Even in isolated areas of country, the Irish are an extrememly sophisiticated people who have always placed a great stock in education which is church based for majority of children. Crossan's to how faithful Catholics might respond to the encyclical Humanae Vitae, so unacceptable and threatening to the Bishop of Chicago, had an internal logic and honesty that, to my mind, the Church, as a whole, has come to lack. Crossan dares to address the problem of how can one be a "good Catholic" given the current state of the Church and presents his way he resolved to live with the conflict. There are exceedinlgy powerful passages in the memoir. One concerns the vow of obedience and the manner in which it came to interfer with his relationship with God and the work that had become his mission. The passages about the death of his wife demonstrate that Crossan is not a man to shy from the processes that make us human beings who find, at times, that it is terribly hard, if not impossible to feel the presence of God. Crossan is an academc, a thelogian, who has written his firrst "personal" book that is filled with wit, humor, irony, wisdom, honesty and, I am the better, stronger, wiser for reading it.

It's too easy to write off Crossan as another "priest who left", but his candid biography makes that task even more difficult, demonstrating that he still and always takes his religion seriously even when his role in it is uncertain.

Crossan's memoir answers almost all the questions I'd have asked him if I could, and more. As another reviewer commented, the passages about the death of his first wife show sweetly (but not sickeningly!), that in leaving the priesthood, Crossan began the proceess of becoming more fully human.

For Crossan, reconstructing himself was part of the task of reconstructing Jesus, for it is in Jesus' full humanity that he finds the deepest roots of his faith. As a Jew, I can't connect with that belief on a theological level, but as a person of faith, I found Crossan's search, both for himself and for the Jesus he was never introduced to in seminary, to be moving in the most profound way.

Though his story might have been more sensationalistic if he'd "lost his faith" and gone on to condemn Christianity, Crossan has taken the nobler path and revitalized Christian thought in the process.

This memoir is an excellent springboard to his other, more theological works, creating a context for his beliefs and presenting a portrait of the kind of sympathetic teacher every religion needs.

Once, a Lutheran pastor went up to an author (who's also an ex-monk who spent many hours in monastic choir and Latin chant) and asked, how could one have a personal relationship with God in prayer when all was set and programmed, all was ritual, formal, and liturgical?? This author later wrote in his memoirs,

"I have never, ever, thought that Latin chant opposes personal prayer. It is simply personal prayer as part of a total community at prayer. It helps you to distinguish, in prayer, between human echo and divine response, between your own will set to sound and the divine will that allegedly transcends it. As a simple analogy: Does singing the national anthem communally enlarge or diminish personal and individual patriotism??"

It's amazing how much you can learn from people who've been deemed outcasts, super-deviants and heretics from your community. I suspect there are Christians who wouldn't touch the works of John Dominic Crossan with a 10-foot pole.

But after reading A Long Way From Tipperary: What A Former Irish Monk Discovered In His Search For The Truth, whilst I'm nowhere near agreeing with his views on the historical Jesus, I can identify with his struggles, his doubts, his pain (I can almost weep with him over the loss of his first wife).

I see a man who needs the love of Jesus Christ, yet also one I can learn from tremendously (even N.T. Wright has celebrated Crossan's genius; see the opening remarks in his chapter on Crossan in Jesus & The Victory of God). If nothing else, Crossan's wit-filled prose brings literary delight which one finds rare in evangelical works. For example:

"If, in fact, you want a parent metaphor for God, I think father is much more appropriate than mother. It is the mother who is publicly knowable, visibly provable, and legally certifiable. You do not need faith to know a mother. You need faith to know a father, because he is known only on the mother's word and sometimes not even then.?" (p.37)


Whilst evangelicals rightly ought to warn the community of the problems in Crossan's writings, we would do well to humble ourselves and learn from our enemies? (wouldn't we want them to learn from us, too?). Try this sharp observation on the Catholic-Protestant schism:

"It is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which Catholicism and Protestantism forced each other into opposite extremes (faith or works, Bible or tradition, individual or community, real or symbolic, etc. or etc.)in that separation within Christianity, Catholicism lost any internal but loyal opposition, any sternly self-critical voice from within. In that separation, Protestantism lost anything to protest against save itself and has continued to fracture into every increasing diversity.?" (p.72, emphasis mine)

Perhaps we need (or God has allowed? or predestined?? [grin]) writers like Crossan, the quintessential postmodern Biblical scholar, drawing his inspiration from, among others, the work of Jacques Derrida, to shake us into seeing our own problems, to look closer at our sacred cows.

And one day Crossan was at a book-signing event, someone came up to him and said, "My pastor told me not to come here tonight because you are even to the left of Marcus Borg.? Crossan replied,

"Give your pastor my best regards and tell him that is the good news. The bad news is that both Borg and me are to the right of Jesus. And worse still, if he will recall Psalm 110, Jesus is to the right of God."

The book covers the span of his childhood, adolescence, his entering and then leaving the seminary, his first wife, his scholarly output at Depaul, all the way up to his current retirement with his second wife. We get glimpses of his youth - needing to memorize classic poetry for class, loving climbing trees, his voracious appetite for reading.

As he continues through the book, the first thing I was struck by was the easygoing, confident style of his writing style. There is no trace of anger or resentment in this theologian who left the priesthood because he wanted complete intellectual freedom. He is loose, occasionally witty, and sincere when he discusses such events as his first wife's heart attack. It's an easy read, personal and informal.

But this is exactly my problem with the book. I know his conclusions - this is the man who once was a traditional, obedient Roman Catholic priest - who later stated that Jesus wasn't resurrected, more likely his body was eaten by dogs. The reason I wanted to read his memoirs was so I could learn about the man and his journey - how did he end up at such an incredibly unorthodox, controversial position? I assume that this is also one of the central reasons other people are reading it too. After all, it's why he is so (in)famous.

Here we have this man who says things very straightforwardly that conflict with traditional Christianity such as: "For myself, therefore, I admit a total disinterest in afterlife options, either to affirm or to deny them. Either way, they distract me from ... the Kingdom of God." "I refuse to accept Heaven from a God who could invent hell.... Hell is an obscenity.... Mrs. Job had the only proper answer: Curse God and die." Whoa! Strong words!

When Crossan himself explains why he turned to historical Jesus research, he says he wishes that there was some 'sexy answer ready for media consumption', but that it is actually a long process. His path went from seminary to becoming interested in parables, the nature of story, and Jesus's words - to proper historical methodology and a growing interest in Jesus's deeds.

I read and reread his account , and it is all so bloodless and uninvolving. It's merely an intellectual odyssey. Yes, I too am fascinated by the nature of parable, etc. But even for a mild mannered academic, how could he have not felt some sturm and drang over concluding that Jesus was a normal human who had been mythologized? Traditional Christians take it for granted that Jesus is NOT merely some archetype or representation of the perfect man - he WAS perfect, he WAS god. Presumably, Crossan thought that at one point too. He never mentions anything in the book to suggest his concept of Jesus was anything but mainstream until his research began. We don't get anything about his sense of purpose or piety before the break, either.

It is as if his scholarly conclusions didn't register emotionally to him. This made the book totally unsatisfying for me. It didn't ring true. Did Crossan truly experience no stress over this? We actually get more on his worries over not being employable after leaving the prieshood! In his "The Birth of Christianity", Crossan discusses how he does not believe that people get up and walk out of graves, ever. What? Where did this come from? We get none of it.

Crossan says at one point that believers could not get past the question: " 'So the Gospel stories are just fictions? ' It was all still negative. There was still no grasp of the positive power of parable." I empathized with how journalists and believers could not really listen to him because they were focused on the destructive element to Crossan position. But I must admit - it just didn't make sense to me how he didn't understand the literal approach, either. I am not a Christian - but I fully relate to the desire to know who Jesus was literally, concretely, historically. That quest MATTERS to me, I feel strongly about it. Creative, accepting, postmodern theologians like Crossan and Bishop John Shelby Spong don't seem to understand that metaphor is NOT what we want, deep down. (At least it's not ALL we want.) We also want to think that our metaphysical beliefs are TRUE, not just 'true for me' or meaningful, no matter how scared we might be into actually questioning them.

Crossan states he believes in God - and I believe him. But he doesn't address what that leaves for his own unique version of Jesus. Was Jesus still special? If not actual part of the trinity, then maybe blessed as the voice of god? Crossan DOES have some interesting things to say on metaphor, the Trinity, to be sure, and I enjoyed them

What I love most about his work is the thrill of his honesty and integrity - how he tries to construct this rigorous, explicit interdisciplinary methodology that spans the cross cultural anthropology of peasant societies, archaelogy, cognitive psychology, the philosophy of social science - the list goes on. Here we have a theologian who has said again and again that his primary motivation in writing his opus "Jesus: The Life of a Mediterrainean Jewish Peasant" was to redefine method in his field , and we get none of his journey on that, either.

Puzzling. Crossan asks himself if he harbors any ill will from his quest, and he says: "Hurt, anger, hate? I do not think so, because I cannot find those feelings anywhere in my heart, but I will let you judge for myself." Unfortunately, I agree - his memoir is strangely casual and passionless. He was this passive, obedient priest who took this abstract, quantum leap right over into postmodern, 'sarcophilic' theology. I still love his other works. This book - it's light, easy reading. But it won't answer any big questions you have about his path.

Before I read this memoir, the only other insight I had of Crossan was from "Excavating Jesus", a book he and Reed collaborated on. Many times I would pause during a particular chapter and ask "Why does Crossan think that?" and I found many of my answers in "A Long Way from Tipperary." This memoir describes how Crossan's upbringining contributed to his analysis of the historical Jesus. It is the genuinity and extreme honesty with which Crossan speaks that makes this memoir truly memorable. I especially liked the parts when Crossan would describe an event in his life and compare it to the life of Jesus and ask how it influenced his conclusions on Jesus- I would have liked to see more of this for it was truly insightful. I also woudl have liked to see more of discussion on his faith in God- he makes the point that he doenst use human logic to prove God's existence yet doenst really seem to describe how he arrived at his conclusion. Overall a great read into a fascinating mind.

John Dominic Crossan has led an adventurous life which included twenty years spent as a Roman Catholic monk and thirty years reconstructing the historical Jesus.

The challenge for me in reading this book is searching for clues as to what factors in his background have influenced his studies and conclusions. His descriptions of his parents, boyhood teachers and youthful life in an Ireland recently freed from its colonial past are fairly interesting but too superficial. More intriguing are those parts of the book which deal with his profound anger directed at the church hierarchy and the chapter which describes the evolution of his early research on the sayings and parables of Jesus into a wider quest focusing on the life of Jesus.

Book Review
A Long Way From Tipperary: A Memoir by John Dominic Crossan (2000)

Dom Crossan, the world's leading expert and best-selling author on the historical Jesus, has written a witty, hearfelt and easy reading (about 200 pages - you can finish it in an afternoon) memoir of his remarkable life. From the Prologue:

"This book is about a series of transitions, from Ireland to America, from priesthood to marriage, from monastery to university, and from academic scholar to public intellectual. It is especially about the transition from a very traditional Roman Catholic faith...to a self-conscious and self-critical Roman Catholic faith for the next [century]."

Born in 1934 in County Kildare, Ireland to parents of modest means, he entered a monastery at sixteen and remained in the priesthood for some nineteen years, most of which was spent as a professor in seminary. After leaving the priesthood to get married, Crossan taught at DePaul University for nearly twenty years. His memoir is a charming recollection of the very different worlds along his life's journey - interspersed with reminiscences of how each episode shaped his thinking.

Crossan, co-founder of the (in)famous Jesus Seminar, has been a public voice proclaiming the need for Christians to revitalize their tradition. Again from the Prologue:

"After a decade of interviews in newspapers and magazines, discussions on radio and television, lectures in parishes and seminaries, colleges and universities, I now recognize a group...who claim a center of the road between secularism and fundamentalism. They are also dissatisfied, disappointed, or even disgusted with Classical Christianity and their denominational tradition...They do not want to invent or join a new age, but to reclaim and redeem an ancient one. They do not want to settle for a generic-brand religion, but to re-discover their own specific and particular roots. But they know now that these roots must be in a renewed Christianity that has purged itself of rationalism, fundamentalism, and literalism, whether of book, tradition, community, or leader. I did not set out to speak to those people, because I did not know they existed until about 80 percent of my mail told me they did."

In the final pages of his memoir, he says:

"In conclusion, this is what I have learned between Ireland and America, monastery and university, priesthood and marriage, scholarship and public discourse. I have learned that God is more radical than we can ever imagine, that a divine utopia on this earth is more subversive than we can ever accept..."

John Dominic Crossan is a monumental figure in the reformation of the Christian tradition underway in the world today. A man of deep faith, profound intellect, and searing vision, this memoir provides a window into the humble origins and very human journey of a great modern sage. His dry Irish wit is ever present, his writing style is clear and conversational and you finish the book with the feeling that you now "know the man". That's what a memoir is all about.