Raymond Brown, R.I.P.
Johnson, Luke Timothy
He can never again be an effective spokesman for government assistance allied to moral discipline. His legendary flexibility will inevitably be interpreted not as a means to a policy but as a...
...It is time," said the president, "to move on...
...When Brown identified as Jewish midrash the poetic beauty of the birth narratives, he found little favor with historicists...
...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...
...We are sympathetic to this argument...
...When he meticulously argued for the fundamental historicity of the Passion accounts, he received like disfavor twice over from ideologues...
...He wrote for ordinary people as well as other scholars...
...His legendary flexibility will inevitably be interpreted not as a means to a policy but as a substitute for one...
...Brown's prodigious gifts of scholarship surfaced early and continued to the end...
...he had been visible and important for so long that they thought of him as "at least eighty...
...All this keeps us from the ranks of those calling upon the president to resign--what columnist Mark Shields has called the "Kevorkian solution...
...Such reactions are tribute to the distinctive place Raymond Edward Brown occupied for some forty years among Roman Catholic biblical scholars...
...Such a mediating position inevitably involves stress and real suffering...
...And the prospect of another stretch of downtime while serious issues confront the nation is deeply discouraging: Child poverty, educational failure, inadequate health care, the festering inequality within and among nations, regional conflict in the Middle East and ethnic atrocities in Africa and Europe, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the economic meltdown of Russia, a one-currency Europe, a tumultuous Islam, a global market in money and culture...
...At least for the moment...
...To remove a president, twice democratically elected, by resignation or impeachment, is a very serious business...
...Martyn at Union Theological Seminary in New York was perhaps the perfect expression of the rapprochement between Catholic and Protestant biblical scholars in America...
...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...
...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...
...For ourselves, we think it's time to wait and watch...
...His long partnership with J.L...
...for many scholars, the imprimatur sought and given for his books indicated a mind too little liberated...
...It is, we suggest, the most prudent course to follow...
...Spin has been indelibly revealed not just as an attribute of his character but its essence...
...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...
...By his lifelong effort to unite loyalty and criticism, he left us an example of what scholarship within the church might mean...
...Through articles, books, countless lectures, statements, and conferences, he popularized the findings of scholarship for the church...
...ews 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...
...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...
...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...
...RAYMOND BROWN, R.I.P...
...At least as significant as his individual publications were his collaborative efforts...
...To turn over the government to a vice-president with a creditable r6sum6 but who is also being pursued by investigators would be no guarantee of stability in government...
...Waiting won't be fun...
...Commonweal 7 September11, 1998...
...If enough influential voices insist that the president can no longer effectively govern, that may assure that he can't...
...Centrist Christian scholarship has lost one of its most visible, articulate, and credible practitioners...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Luke Timothy Johnson, author of The Real Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco), is the Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University...
...He showed it was possible to unite the highest standards of scholarship and the highest devotion to the faith...
...And everyone expressed surprise that he was "only seventy" at the time of his death...
...The burden of doing that rests largely with him...
...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...
...For some conservative Catholics he was far too liberal...
...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...
...His scholarship was universally acknowledged as learned, responsible, and preeminently fair...
...I was there for a consultation on world religions...
...There is, unfortunately, a circularity to this argument...
Vol. 125 • September 1998 • No. 15
