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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2023
Fifty years ago, Raymond Brown had already established his position as one of the world's leading Catholic New Testament scholars. His magisterial two-volume commentary on John's gospel remains an invaluable reference for scholars. At a time when American Catholics were still “minor leaguers” in contrast to British, German, and French exegetes, biblical theologians, Fr. Brown along with Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, and Roland E. Murphy, OCarm. had produced the Jerome Biblical Commentary (1968) to provide a solid foothold for students in the best of historical-critical research into the books of the Bible, their history, religion, and theological concepts. Like his coeditors, Brown remained convinced that careful historical-critical study was our surest way of understanding what the Bible's authors sought to communicate. Where that analysis unseated naïve or literalist dogmatic “proof-texting,” it requires a correction in theological argument but will not require rejection of the foundational dogmas of the church.
23 Brown, Raymond E., The Gospel According to John I–XII (AB 29; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Raymond E., The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI (AB 29A; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Raymond E., SS, Fitzmyer, Joseph A., SJ, and Murphy, Roland E., OCarm., eds. The Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968)Google Scholar. Kevin Duffy observes that after 1970 Brown ceases to invoke his earlier work on sensus plenior and its neoscholastic language, opting instead for more pragmatic, piecemeal efforts on topics as in his work on the virgin birth. Brown presents this “historical-critical approach” as an instance of God's “incarnational economy of salvation,” using the human with all of its limitations. While always subject to areas of uncertainty, historical study can and should rule out implausible, impossible interpretations. Duffy, Kevin, “The Ecclesial Hermeneutic of Raymond E. Brown,” Heythrop Journal 39 (1998): 37–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Brown, Raymond E., “Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?” Theological Studies 26, no. 4 (1965): 545–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Brown, “Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?,” 545–46.
26 Brown, Raymond E., “After Bultmann, What?—An Introduction to the Post-Bultmannians,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 26 (1964): 1–30Google Scholar.
27 Brown, “After Bultmann, What?,” 21. And his early career work on the Dead Sea Scrolls would inform all of his subsequent work on depicting just what that religious world and its language communicated.
28 Brown, “After Bultmann, What?,” 24–29. Brown's work was well regarded in Protestant circles, where he was deeply engaged in ecumenical discussions and studies. It figures in the largely Protestant survey of Christology since Bousset in 1979 by Larry W. Hurtado, “New Testament Christology: A Critique of Bousset's Influence,” Theological Studies 40 (1979): 306–17. To counter the Bousset effect, Hurtado highlights for future study two features of Brown's work: 1) study of the Old Testament's influence on New Testament Christology (and its use in second Temple Jewish sources); 2) recognition of how Jesus's earthly ministry contributed to Christology.
29 Donald Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal (New York: Paulist Press, 2018), 77. Throughout his life, Fr. Brown retained a skeptical attitude about the repeated claims to “new approaches” whether literary or from a social criticism or the various “hermeneutics of suspicion” approaches. In preparing the notes, a draft for an introduction to a revision of his John commentary that Brown left behind when he died of cardiac arrest at age seventy, Francis Moloney grappled with the question of how far Brown might have been willing to incorporate the subsequent literary approaches; Francis J. Moloney, “Raymond Brown's New Introduction to the Gospel of John: A Presentation—And Some Questions,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly (2003): 1–21. To some extent, that appeared to be the case, along with Fr. Brown's own “social mapping” of a story of the Johannine communities and their theological modulations that he had formulated by the time he wrote the final volume of his Anchor Bible Johannine trilogy on the Johannine epistles; Raymond E. Brown, The Epistles of John. Anchor Yale Bible Commentary Series, vol. 30 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982), 69–115. The significance, however, of these initial landmarks for historical criticism that aligns with emerging orthodoxy guides the sketches of Johannine communities. In painting the dissident secessionists who have broken with the elder's authentic Johannine tradition, the key is “historical Jesus and Christology.” Brown comments: “the point of difference between the secessionists to be the salvific value of Jesus’ career in the flesh and the degree to which that career was part of his identity as the Christ, inevitably the attitude toward his death will be crucial” (77).
30 Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 121. Brown's outline for revision incorporates a section on the Johannine Jesus as Son of Man, and personified wisdom. In Brown's Epistles, Christology figures under the heading of reconstructing the position of the presbyter's adversaries, not in the “theological topics” (abiding, life, love, sin, truth).
31 Raymond E. Brown, “The Kerygma of the Gospel According to John: The Johannine View of Jesus in Modern Studies,” Interpretation 21, no. 4 (1967): 387–400. Brown's critical summary of Oscar Cullmann finds the popular “salvation history” approach a plausible reading of Luke-Acts, but distorting the Johannine kerygma, which does not present a continuity between the Israelite traditions and Jesus (p. 395).
32 An observation that Brown makes in discussing Ernst Kaesemann; see “The Kerygma of the Gospel According to John,” 397.
33 Though I would concur with the additional rider in Brown's note 5: “a pastoral concern for the Church” and “regard religion as more than a scientific discipline.”
34 Raymond E. Brown, “‘Who Do Men Say That I Am?’—Modern Scholarship on Gospel Christology,” Horizons 1 (1974): 48. [Editor's note: references hereafter will be to “Gospel Christology.”
35 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 49. In note 22, Brown even suggests that Nicea's “true God of true God” did not terminate the search for adequate expression of the “who” Jesus is.
36 And perhaps the scholarly associations that would result in my own book on New Testament Christology coauthored with one of the names in Brown's “implicit Christology” box; Reginald Fuller, Who Is This Christ? (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1983).
37 As they do to my graduate students in New Testament Christology today, but see Don Senior's account (Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 199–230), as well as Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, “Raymond E. Brown, S.S. In Memoriam,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 54, no. 3 (1998): 12–18, a section entitled, “The Unjust Criticism and Persecution of Raymond Brown”; and Ronald D. Witherup, SS, “Raymond E. Brown and Catholic Exegesis in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective,” U.S. Catholic Historian 31, no. 4 (2013): 15–21. I personally witnessed his distress over public criticism in a private conversation with Fr. Brown after I had published some critical disagreements with the Johannine community typology (Community of the Beloved Disciple [New York: Paulist Press, 1979]) in America magazine. The problem was not an unwillingness to engage in scholarly debate—though I did not change his mind—it was “weaponizing” the comments of another Catholic scholar by attackers.
38 Over the thirty years that I have worked with parish adult faith formation, the biblical fundamentalism among parishioners is growing and now almost entirely from evangelical Protestant spouses, radio, and other media. So as a pastoral necessity, Fr. Brown's repeated instructions on how Catholics view the Bible remain urgent.
39 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 42.
40 For the New Testament, the “love ethic” is not to be divorced from the believers’ confession about Jesus (Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 43).
41 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 46.
42 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 48n19.
43 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 49nn20–21.
44 Raymond Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994). Chapter 2 of that book repeats the schema charted in his 1974 address.
45 Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 149–150. For a critique of Schillebeeckx's theological hermeneutic, see Dennis Rochford, “The Theological Hermeneutics of Edward Schillebeeckx,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 251–67. Unlike Brown's approach, which remains focused on what is written, the biblical texts, Schillebeeckx adopts the hermeneutic that goes from the text to experience. Rochford challenges that emphasis on such categories as Jesus's “Abba” experience and an alleged “Jewish conversion model” that infer some coherence between first-century Galilean Jews and twentieth-century Europeans as well as being an incomplete version of human experience (pp. 257–260).
46 Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 150. Not given to the philosophical side of hermeneutics, Brown does not provide a phenomenology of such experience. His emphasis remains strongly fixed on what is conveyed at the level of the text. At that level, attention to an evangelist's literary style is necessary to understanding. As Brown notes in interpreting Mark's Passion narrative: “Throughout we have seen that the Marcan PN is a skillful, effective narrative with good popular touches. The fact that seeming surrogates for the divine name were not quite accurate [Mk 14:61] would make little difference if they had the flavor of how it was thought that Jews would speak”; Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 470.
47 First coined in the 1901 book by Wilhelm Wrede, it influenced generations of German scholarship with a range of disagreement over whether this reticence might be a feature of Jesus's own ministry (so Albert Schweitzer) to seeing it as the evangelist's own work (so Bultmann). Translated into English in 1971, Wrede's book continues to play a role in Markan studies; The Messianic Secret, trans. J. G. C. Greig (Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1971). For a summary of the discussion, see Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 170–72. She concludes that the various “secrecy” elements in the Gospel, including that concerning the parables of Jesus (Mk 4:10-12) are the evangelist's literary devices, some perhaps adopted from traditions he inherited. Their purpose is to imply that during his lifetime Jesus's own identity had been both revealed and concealed. That literary approach leaves the gap between kerygma and a historical grounding in what is/was the case about Jesus firmly intact. Fr. Brown's theological instincts for a conservative but rigorous historical criticism repeatedly resist scholarly moves toward various forms of literary criticism as the privileged hermeneutic in gospel studies.
48 Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 42–59. For a detailed analysis of these issues and the associated Christological titles that figure in gospel accounts of Jesus's trial(s), see his commentary on the passion narratives; Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 1:461–79.
49 Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 1:479.
50 Despite the later combination of “proof texts” from 2 Samuel 7:14 for “son” and Psalms 2:7 and 110:3 for “begotten by God,” which became a staple in earliest Christian arguments for Jesus's messianic status and remain firmly embedded in our Roman Catholic liturgical celebrations to this day. The apparent example of “begotten by God” plus a Davidic messiah among the Qumran texts (1 QSa 2:11-12) cannot carry the argument against the lack of evidence from other Jewish sources and even an interpretation of 2 Samuel 7:11-14 from the Dead Sea Scrolls that does not highlight the “son” in verse 14 (4QFlor 1:7-13); Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 1:481). So, Brown tells readers of his introduction that it would be “unwise” to make a case for use of “Son of God” referring to Jesus during his lifetime dependent on fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls. And for that general audience, he adds a caveat: saying that Jesus would not have referred to himself as “Son of God” is not logically equivalent to saying that the “Jesus=Son of God” is false; Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 80–82.
51 With the necessary scholarly qualifications that the once popular claims that this usage was unique to Jesus and reflects a particularly intimate way of addressing God is a complete distortion of the evidence; Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 85–87.
52 An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 87–89.
53 Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 534–35.
54 Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 545–47.
55 Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, 547. Or as Brown puts it in the general reader version of his results, not only is there no reason for Jesus not to have anticipated both his rejection and that God would vindicate him so that it is possible to read Mark 14:62 as close to Jesus's own mindset; Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 99.
56 As is shown by the long list of Catholic scholars and their institutional affiliations that Brown and his coeditors gathered to produce their New Jerome Biblical Commentary published in 1990, to which I contributed among other entries the commentaries on the Gospel and the Epistles of John for which Fr. Joseph A. Fitzmyer served as editor rather than Fr. Brown.
57 Even the subtle attempts that Brown makes toward bridging can go unrecognized as in Senior's presentation of Brown's big-picture project in the Passion narrative opus as the quest to determine with reasonable probability how the evangelists understood Jesus's death, not an exercise in grounding Christology (Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 145–49).
58 Raymond Brown took on this typology of scholarly miscreants in his Presidential Address to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1986; “The Gospel of Peter and Canonical Gospel Priority,” New Testament Studies 33 (1987): 321–43.
59 Though he concurs with the scholarly recognition that most of our biblical writings, Old Testament and New Testament, contain evidence of compilation, scribal expansions, and use of earlier materials, Brown remained quite conservative about scholarly reconstructions of such sources from the texts we have. For his theological reflection on Scripture as word of God, see Raymond E. Brown, “‘And the Lord Said’? Biblical Reflections on Scripture as the Word of God,” Theological Studies 42, no. 1 (1981): 3–19.
60 As in suggestions of a Lonerganian framework for the question of Jesus's consciousness from the systematic side requires engagement with Brown's exegetical queries about bridging the Jesus and kerygma gap. See Neil Ormerod and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer, “Sacred Heart, Beatific Mind: Exploring the Consciousness of Jesus,” Theological Studies 79, no. 4 (2018): 729–44. Their sketch of the differentiated human consciousness, feeling, and affectivity might fill in the gaps in an awareness of self that Brown finds lacking in exegesis that remains stuck with a “fully human Jesus” who could not affirm a unique God relationship.
61 See Jens Schröter, “Die aktuelle Diskussion über den historischen Jesus und ihre Bedeutung für die Christologie,” in Zwischen historischen Jesus und dogmatishcen Christus. Zum Stand der Christologie ins 21 Jahrhundert, ed. Christian Danz and Michael Murrmann-Kahl (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010): 67–86.
62 And given the unintelligibility of such traditional ideas as “forgiveness of sins” and “cultic sacrificial death” to twenty-first-century believers, simply refining the historical Jesus picture is necessary; Schröter, “Die aktuelle Diskussion über den historischen Jesus und ihre Bedeutung für die Christologie,” 86.
63 Matthew Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Titles do not bring a fixed program or identity with them. “Messiah” functions within a larger Jewish story of eschatological redemption. Both ancient Jewish and Christian users can employ the existing lexical resources including those of Jewish scriptures in diverse ways. Reviewing Novenson's book, N. T. Wright suggests that this linguistic turn should incorporate a larger story that acknowledged the distinction between “messiah” and prophetic figures. A “messiah” is not one in a series, but represents the point at which Israel's God is accomplishing what its people had long hoped for; N. T. Wright, Review of M. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism, in Expository Times 129, no. 7 (2018): 295–302.
64 Raymond E. Brown, “Not Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity but Types of Jewish/Gentile Christianity,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 45 (1983): 74–79.
65 He suggests this even leads the evangelist to a disdain for those believers who appear more concerned to live within the synagogue than confess belief in Jesus as Son of God; Brown, “Not Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity but Types of Jewish/Gentile Christianity,” 79n16.
66 Larry W. Hurtado, “Pre-70 CE Jewish Opposition to Christ-Devotion,” Journal of Theological Studies 50, no. 1 (1999): 35–57; Larry W. Hurtado, “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament,” Journal of Religion 80/2 (2000): 183–205.
67 Schröter, “Die aktuelle Diskussion über den historischen Jesus und ihre Bedeutung für die Christologie,” 60.
68 This could possibly refer to Paul's citation of an earlier Christian hymnic piece, though recent commentaries make a case for this section as emanating from the Philippian community; see John Reumann, Philippians. Anchor Yale Bible Commentary Series, vol. 33B. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008): 365–77, or Paul himself (see Paul A. Holloway, Philippians (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017), 116–17.
69 Hurtado suggests that scholars have been slow to embrace “religious experience” in discussing the origins of Christology because academic social sciences often treat it as derivative or presume a deprivation theory explanation; [69] Hurtado, “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament,” 187–92).
70 Hurtado, “Religious Experience and Religious Innovation in the New Testament,” 193.
71 Hurtado, “Pre-70 CE Jewish Opposition to Christ-Devotion,” 58.
72 O'Collins, Gerald Glynn, SJ, “Does Philippians 2:6-11 Present Christ as a Superior Angel?” Expository Times 133, no. 7 (2022): 269–74Google Scholar; Holloway, Paul A., “Ideology and Exegesis: A Response to Gerald O'Collins,” Expository Times 133, no. 7 (2022): 275–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 Holloway, “Ideology and Exegesis,” 275.
74 Contrary to Raymond Brown's insistence upon a Jewish “lexicon” for understanding “Son of God,” Adela Collins insists that “Son of God” in Mark's gospel is dependent upon Greco-Roman religious language. See Adela Yarbro Collins, “Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Greeks and Romans,” Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 2 (2000): 85–100; however, in her commentary, Collins's introduction, which focuses on how the gospel fits into the ancient Greco-Roman ideas of history and narrative (Mark as “eschatological historical monograph”), eschews the category “Christology” for a label “interpretations of Jesus.” That section includes extensive discussion of the Jewish context for prophet, messiah, and teacher; Collins, “Mark and His Readers,” 42–79.