Raymond Brown, R.I.P.

News of the death of Raymond E. Brown was carried to the Wabash Center for the Teaching of Religion and Theology by Gustav Niebuhr's obituary in the New York Times (August 11, 1998). I was there for a consultation on world religions. As the news of the eminent scholar's death spread among the participants, it struck me that no one needed to be told "which" Raymond Brown was meant, even among scholars in disciplines far from his own specialty in New Testament. And everyone expressed surprise that he was "only seventy" at the time of his death; he had been visible and important for so long that they thought of him as "at least eighty."

Such reactions are tribute to the distinctive place Raymond Edward Brown occupied for some forty years among Roman Catholic biblical scholars. Centrist Christian scholarship has lost one of its most visible, articulate, and credible practitioners.

Brown's prodigious gifts of scholarship surfaced early and continued to the end. His output was enormous: It includes his major commentaries on the Gospel and Letters of John, his influential studies on the birth and death of Jesus, and many smaller studies of issues in New Testament history and theology. His scholarship was universally acknowledged as learned, responsible, and preeminently fair. He had a distinctive ability to take on a complicated issue, sort through every opinion ever expressed on it in the history of scholarship, and render a judgment that, if neither revolutionary nor brilliant, was always reasonable.

At least as significant as his individual publications were his collaborative efforts. With Joseph Fitzmyer and Roland Murphy he edited The Jerome Biblical Commentary, which, perhaps more than any other single volume, signaled the coming of age of Catholic critical scholarship. Less visible but no less important were the ecumenical studies of Mary and Peter that Brown and Fitzmyer produced together with Protestant colleagues, his collaboration with John Meier in the study of early Christianity in Antioch and Rome, and his participation and leadership in translation and lectionary projects. His long partnership with J.L. Martyn at Union Theological Seminary in New York was perhaps the perfect expression of the rapprochement between Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars in America.

He wrote for ordinary people as well as other scholars. Through articles, books, countless lectures, statements, and conferences, he popularized the findings of scholarship for the church. He thus functioned as an indispensable bridge between those skeptical of Catholicism's willingness to engage Scripture critically and those skeptical of critical scholarship's willingness to engage the New Testament as Sacred Scripture. He showed it was possible to unite the highest standards of scholarship and the highest devotion to the faith. For in an era when biblical scholarship increasingly turned toward the academy, Father Brown's work, while meeting the highest scholarly standards, was nonetheless rendered as a service in and for the church.

Such a mediating position inevitably involves stress and real suffering. When Brown identified as Jewish midrash the poetic beauty of the birth narratives, he found little favor with historicists. When he meticulously argued for the fundamental historicity of the Passion accounts, he received like disfavor twice over from ideologues. For some conservative Catholics he was far too liberal; for many scholars, the imprimatur sought and given for his books indicated a mind too little liberated. But throughout his long time in the public eye, Father Brown responded to controversy by consistently employing the craft of the scholar: compiling the minute data pertinent to the issue, assembling the points for and against every position, arguing with constant and dispassionate judiciousness for the conclusion that seemed most probable, or as close as we might get to the truth with our frail instruments of learning. By his lifelong effort to unite loyalty and criticism, he left us an example of what scholarship within the church might mean.

LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON 

Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus (Harper-San Francisco), is the Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.