Raymond E. Brown

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Father Raymond Edward Brown, S.S., M.A., S.T.L. (May 22, 1928-August 8, 1998), was an American Roman Catholic priest appointed in 1972 and in 1996 to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which advises the pontiff on scriptural matters, and professor emeritus at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York where he taught for 23 years.

He was widely regarded as one of America's preeminent biblical scholars. Cardinal Mahony spoke of him as "the most distinguished and renowned Catholic biblical scholar to emerge in this country ever" whose death was "a great loss to the Church". Brown was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees by universities in the USA and Europe, many from Protestant institutions, and received the Catholic Press Book Award, Edgar J. Godspeed Award, BAS Publ. Award, Best NT Comm. He served as president of the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature (1976-7) and the Society of New Testament Studies (1986-7). He was a member of the scholarly Society of Saint-Sulpice and a Roman Catholic priest in the diocese of Baltimore, Maryland.

Brown's approach assumed that Scripture may contain error in matters not pertaining to salvation; this is a relatively modern stance, but Fr Brown was equally insistent on the limitations of scientific biblical methods including textual criticism in solving the Church's problems or addressing central questions of faith [1]. The traditional approach to Scripture is that it contains no error, and that all of it is in some way related to salvation. This shift in the scholarly approach is at the root of the conclusion of some who consider his scholarship open-minded and measured. The more permissive stance in relation to Scripture is appealing to skeptics and a great number of Christians alike; and his books enjoy wide success.

He was an expert on the hypothetical Johannine community and wrote the volumes covering the Gospel of John in the New Anchor Bible Commentary.

Brown's article "Does the New Testament call Jesus God?" in Theological Studies[2] #26 (1965) p. 545-73, questioned whether the title "God" was ever used of Jesus in the New Testament. He did not question whether Jesus is in fact God ("This question," he says, "was settled for the Church at Nicaea."), only whether the New Testament ever directly attributes that title to Jesus. The article can be summarized as follows: Mark 10:18, Luke 18:19, Matt 19:17, Mark 15:34, Matt 27:46, John 20:17, Ephesians 1:17, 2Cor 1:3, 1Pet 1:3, John 17:3, 1Cor 8:6, Ephesians 4:4-6, 1Cor 12:4-6, 2Cor 13:14, 1Tim 2:5, John 14:28, Mark 13:32, Phil 2:5-10, 1Cor 15:24-28 are "texts that seem to imply that the title God was not used for Jesus. [. . .] Jesus is never called God in the Synoptic Gospels, and a passage like Mk 10:18 would seem to preclude the possibility that Jesus used the title of himself. Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God. The sermons which Acts attributes to the beginning of the Christian mission do not speak of Jesus as God. Thus, there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition. This negative conclusion is substantiated by the fact that Paul does not use the title in any epistle written before 58. [. . .] The slow development of the usage of the title God for Jesus requires explanation. Not only is there the factor that Jesus is not called God in the earlier strata of New Testament material, but also there are passages, cited in the first series of texts above, that by implication reserve the title God for the Father. Moreover, even in the New Testament works that speak of Jesus as God, there are also passages that seem to militate against such a usage - a study of these texts will show that this is true of the Pastorals and the Johannine literature. The most plausible explanation is that in the earliest stage of Christianity the Old Testament heritage dominated the use of the title God; hence, God was a title too narrow to be applied to Jesus. It referred strictly to the Father of Jesus, to the God whom he prayed. Gradually, (in the 50's and 60's?) in the development of Christian thought God was understood to be a broader term. It was seen that God had revealed so much of Himself in Jesus that God had to be able to include both Father and Son." His conclusion was that Jesus was called God in the New Testament, but the development was gradual and did not emerge until late in the New Testament tradition.

30 years later, Brown revisited the issue, writing that in "three reasonably clear instances in the NT [Hebrews 1:8-9, John 1:1, 20:28] and in five instances that have probability, Jesus is called God. The use of God for Jesus that is attested in the early 2nd-century was a continuation of a usage that had begun in NT times. There is no reason to be surprised at this. Jesus is Lord was evidently a popular confessional formula in NT times, and in this formula Christians gave Jesus the title kyrios which was the Septuagint translation for YHWH. If Jesus could be given this title, why could he not be called God (theos), which the Septuagint often used to translate Elohim? The two Hebrew terms had become relatively interchangeable, and indeed YHWH was the more sacred term." (An Introduction to New Testament Christology, p. 189).

He died at St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California.

His total of 25 books on biblical subjects include:

The Sensus Plenior of Sacred Scripture, Baltimore: St. Mary's University, 1955: His dissertation in Partial fulfillment of his Doctor of Sacred Theology
Birth of the Messiah 1998, with a reappraisal of the infancy gospels
Death of the Messiah
New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (editor), 1990
Mary and the New Testament
Peter in the New Testament
The Community of the Beloved Disciple, New York: Paulist Press, 1979
"The Gospel According to John", in Anchor Bible, 1966 and 1970 *The Critical Meaning of the Bible, New York: Paulist Press, 1981
Responses to 101 Questions on the Bible, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1991, ISBN 0-225-66632-4
An Introduction to the New Testament, 1996