The Death of the Messiah from Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives of the Four Gospels.

The publication shortly before Easter of this massive study of Our Lord's Passion and death was timely not only for its appearance in the appropriate liturgical season, but more significantly for giving expression to solid and sane scholarship in a time of sensationalism and empty speculation.

Those whose taste is for the novel, and whose appetites have been whetted by the recent efforts of the "Jesus Seminar," with its publication of The Five Gospels (Macmillan), and Burton Mack The Lost Gospel, HarperSanFrancisco), with his forays into the Q community, and John Dominic Crossan (The Historical Jesus, HarperSanFrancisco), whose recent large and smaller books on Jesus depend heavily on social scientific theory and complex source theories, will find little to please them in this book.

The Father Brown who devoted two large volumes to exhaustive analysis of the Gospel of John and then a third to the Johannine Letters, who constructed still another monument providing "everything you ever wanted to know about the birth of the Messiah," was not likely to squander ten years of labor on this task shaping headlines for USA Today. Here is a scholar who has devoted a lifetime to demonstrating to a church, which in his youth disallowed such efforts, and equally to a scholarly guild that discredited such efforts, that it is possible to combine faithfulness to the church with critical scholarship. This book, focused on the primordial scandal of the crucified Messiah, a subject ripe for distortion and rife with controversy, does nothing to discredit those years of service. If later in this review I chip at the mountain at one place or another, let me register from the start that I know a mountain when I see one.

First of all, then, the obvious. This is a large production. It spans two volumes, containing almost 1,600 pages of prose at its most prosaic, some 72 pages of closely spaced bibliographic entries, and 275 pages of appendices as chaser. This is not a quick read. Nor is it an easy one. Raymond Brown offers no teasers or hooks. He has no new theory or explosive hypothesis to spring on the reader. The story still turns out the same way. Instead, as he helpfully states in his first paragraph, he seeks "to explain in detail what the evangelists intended and conveyed to their audiences by their narratives of the Passion and death of Jesus."

To do this, Brown chose to write a commentary. The reader is led through the text word by word. Those who know Brown's earlier works will find here his accustomed uniform and punctilious attention to every detail. Nothing escapes detection, dissection, discussion. Although every commentary works through the text sequentially, the structuring of the text and the discussion can have considerable consequences, some of them unintended.

Brown's commentary considers the Passion as a drama divided into four acts: (1) Jesus' prayer and arrest in Gethsemane; (2) Jesus before the Jewish authorities; (3) Jesus before Pilate; (4) Jesus' death and burial.

Each of these acts, in turn, is broken into separate scenes. For each section of text under consideration, Brown provides a highly literal translation of each version containing that segment (including the parallels in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter). The translation is followed by "comment," which takes up the specific text-critical, linguistic, thematic, and comparative questions pertinent to the passage. Then Brown turns to "analysis," which takes up debates concerning the literary formation of the narratives together with their fictional or historical qualities.

Such complex considerations are necessary because Brown recognizes that the Passion narratives are complex compositions. Simple solutions for the problems posed by their origin, literary interdependence, historical reliability, and theological intentions are probably wrong to the degree that they are simple. Brown characteristically considers virtually every scholarly position on all these questions, sifts through them, and arrives at a judicious conclusion concerning each.

At the literary level, Brown goes against a major segment of recent scholarship, for example, which considers Mark to have created the Passion narrative. Brown argues that characteristics of all versions of the Passion, together with clues provided by other early writings (such as the Letters of Paul and Hebrews), lead to the opposite conclusion: there were at least pre-Markan Passion traditions, most probably in some ordered sequence. On the other hand, Brown considers every attempt to reconstruct that pre-Markan Passion as futile, offering in evidence a lengthy appendix showing (with the help of Marion Soards) the multiple and mutually contradictory conclusions reached by such efforts.

In similar fashion, he rejects Crossan's ingenious hypothesis that the canonical Passion accounts derived from an early version of the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. Another appendix is devoted to the argument that the relationship is better understood as running the opposite way, with the Gospel of Peter using the canonical versions, as well as various embellishments picked up through oral tradition. Brown also takes the position that Mark is the source for both Matthew and Luke. In opposition to another school of scholars, he argues that Luke did not use a separate Passion account, but rather worked creatively with Mark and some extra materials. Matthew also used Mark and had access to the same sort of folkloric traditions that enlivened his infancy narrative. John's narrative is independent of the synoptics but taps into some of the traditions shared by the synoptics.

Although Brown spends an extravagant amount of space debating these issues, his intended focus is on the meaning of the narratives as we now have them. He recognizes that the narratives are less satisfying as history than as witness and interpretation. He consistently moves from the smallest details of language to the overarching themes that characterize each of these accounts, as well as their progress through the entire narrative of the respective Gospels. Thus, despite the remarkable closeness of Matthew's and Mark's versions, Brown shows how Matthew's slight alterations and additions add to Mark's depiction of bleak abandonment an even more "haunting issue of responsibility" involving the Jewish people. He traces out Luke's distinctive shading of that issue of responsibility, which shows a Jewish population divided in its response to Jesus rather than uniform in its rejection. Luke's Jesus, in turn, is a more active, philosophical character, who until the very end continues to heal and reconcile and save. And the Jesus in John's Passion is even more in control, even more emphatically a figure of triumph. Brown demonstrates how these separate tellings of the story yield an astonishingly rich mosaic of meaning.

Yet Brown avoids the unhappy choice between history and fiction. He understands that beneath interpretive shaping there can still reside historical fact. And his search for it gains credibility by his willingness to recognize places where it can't be found, as in Matthew's apocalyptic "events" accompanying the death of Jesus. Brown finds a not inconsiderable core of history within these accounts: not only the brute fact of "crucified under Pontius Pilate," but also the high probability of active involvement by Jewish leadership, and some hints as to why Jesus' activities might have generated substantial opposition. Among the rich features of these volumes are the substantial essays devoted to such topics as: "The Background for the Jewish Trial/Interrogation of Jesus," and "Background for the Roman Trial of Jesus." In these essays, Brown demonstrates his remarkable ability to distill masses of scholarship on complex issues to clear and intelligible form. The same can be said for the essays found in the appendices, dealing with such disparate topics as the date of the Crucifixion, and the career of Judas Iscariot, the scriptural background to the Passion accounts, and the likelihood of Jesus' having predicted his death.

But there is also something of the antiquarian and curiosity seeker in this scholar, revealed in his refusal to let any topic go undiscussed. Brown not only considers every textual variant and every troublesome point of translation (another appendix given to the worst of these!), but he toils over the medical aspects of Jesus' death, and the attitudes of Romans concerning the disposition of crucified bodies, and (with a slight smile) the incidence of cock-crowing in Jerusalem. Brown is not content with a broad characterization of, let us say, Josephus's view of bandits. He demands of himself and his reader a close consideration of every passage in which Josephus considers them.

The more one is acquainted with the difficulties of negotiating scholarship on the ancient world, the more awesome Brown's working through of such minutiae with such steady attention appears. This really is a mountain. Yet it is precisely the overwhelming comprehensiveness of the work which suggests some limits to its usefulness. I have in mind here some of the compositional decisions that have made this a better compendium of information than a challenging interpretation of narratives.

First, Brown himself recognized that his decision to comment on all four versions of each portion of the narrative together was debatable, but decided that its benefits exceeded its drawbacks. Some readers will disagree, finding the arrangement clumsy, tending (despite Brown's strong intentions and best efforts) toward harmonization, and creating needless repetition. Questions considered in the "comment" are often revisited in the "analysis," precisely because Brown is juggling too many texts and issues at once.

Second, Brown's lengthy consideration of each and every detail inevitably makes it difficult, even for the best prepared reader, to follow the thread of argument, much less of interpretation. The book is peppered with mini-essays and scholarly disquisitions. Observation follows observation, distinction builds on distinction, with inexorable energy and logic. These sometimes distended discussions distract from the larger argument, so that Brown is forced into numerous transitions, resumptions, summaries, and conclusions. Sensitivity to this problem may have led to the wonderfully clear and simple expositions that now begin the book. There, Brown lays out his purposes, and provides a helpful sketch of the theological perspectives of each evangelist's version. This is a help, but not a complete remedy.

Third, the effect of these factors--whether Brown intended this or not--is to place far more attention on questions of source-criticism and history than on questions of meaning. It is perhaps telling that, after working through so much data and so many debates, Brown comes to a rather abrupt end with debates about the burial, and then continues with the appendices that take up further debates. The reader of these most puzzling, provocative, and paradoxical accounts hungers, at the end, for something more than "explanation."

If there has been a consistent complaint about Raymond Brown's previous commentaries, it has been precisely this one. There is no one anywhere better at laying out the issues, surveying the options, explaining the problems. But explanation does not move automatically to interpretation. And it is here that scholarly readers, while still immeasurably grateful for the "explanation," will challenge Brown on specific points of interpretation. One can appreciate, for example, the precise delineation of the debates concerning Mark's "naked young man" who flees at the arrest of Jesus, yet find Brown's rejection of possible intertextual connections curiously flat. One might admire his review of the data concerning Herod in history and in Luke's narrative, yet come to quite another reading of Herod's role within that narrative. Or one might find his lengthy discussions of the proper understanding of kathizein in John--or the significance of Nicodemus's bringing of spices to the burial--models of dispassionate argument, yet come to conclusions precisely the opposite of his.

Yet for each such point of disagreement, Brown himself provides the evidence! And that, in an age of rigged arguments and specious claims, is testimony to the greatness of his accomplishment. There has certainly never been a more complete, better informed, more fairly or more carefully argued consideration of the Passion narratives. It is a resource for anyone seeking genuine learning and disciplined debate on this most challenging of narratives. And it appears at a good time.

LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON is professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. He is the author of The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, and Faith's Freedom: A Classic Spirituality for Contemporary Christians (both Fortress).