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Father Raymond Edward Brown (May 22, 1928 - August 8, 1998), was an American Roman Catholic priest and Biblical scholar. He was an expert on the hypothetical Johannine community, and he maintained that the Bible may contain errors provided those errors do not pertain to salvation. He wrote that Jesus did not call himself God, nor did Christians until later in the 1st century.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Scholarly views 2.1 New Testament Christology 3 References 4 Works 5 External links

Brown was appointed in 1972 and in 1996 to the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which advises the pontiff on scriptural matters. He was also professor emeritus at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York where he taught for 23 years.

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.

Widely regarded as one of America's preeminent biblical scholars, Brown was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees by universities in the USA and Europe, many from Protestant institutions.^[1]

He died at St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California. 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".^[1]

Much of Brown's work, such as 'The New Jerome Biblical Commentary' has been given an Nihil obstat and an Imprimatur. He could issue Nihil obstats upon a work that requested it, as he did with many of his own works such as in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary^[2].

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. 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.

In a detailed 1965 article in the journal Theological Studies^[3] examining whether Jesus was ever called "God" in the New Testament, Brown concluded that "Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God" and "there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition." He argued that, "Gradually, 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."

Thirty years later, Brown revisited the issue in an introductory text for the general public, 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", a usage Brown regarded as a natural development of early references to Jesus as "Lord".^[4]

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, New York: Paulist Press, 1991, ISBN 0-8091-4251-1
• An Introduction to the New Testament, 1996

• Biblical Theology Bulletin obituary notice
• Cardinal Ratzinger / Benedict XVI On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today
• Henry V. King, Traditional Catholic Scholars Long Opposed Fr Brown's Theories (1998).
• George A. Kelly, A Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory (1999)