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Over his illustrious career, Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Ph.D., was internationally regarded as a dean of New Testament scholars. He was Auburn Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York City,where he taught for 29 years. He received over thirty honorary degrees from Catholic and Protestant universities worldwide, and was elected a (Corresponding) Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to serving as president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Catholic Biblical Association, and the Society of New Testament Studies, two popes appointed Father Brown as the sole American on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in New York, the son of Robert H. Brown and Loretta Brown, Raymond studied at the Catholic University of America where he received a BA in 1948 and MA in 1949. In 1951 he joined the scholarly Society of Saint-Sulpice following his STB from St Mary's Seminary and University. In 1953 he was ordained a priest in the diocese of St. Augustine, Florida. He earned a Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University where one of his advisors was Professor William F. Albright.

Brown was appointed in 1972 to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and again in 1996. He was the Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York where he taught from 1971 to 1990, when he became professor emeritus. 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 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.

He died at St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California. Cardinal Mahony hailed him as "the most distinguished and renowned Catholic biblical scholar to emerge in this country ever" and his death, the cardinal said, was "a great loss to the Church."

HIS SCHOLARSHIP

Brown was one of the first Catholic scholars in the United States to use the historical-critical method to study the Bible. In 1943, reversing the approach that had existed since Providentissimus Deus fifty years earlier, the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu expressed approval of historical-critical methods. For Brown, this was a "Magna Carta for biblical progress". In 1965, at the Second Vatican Council, the Church moved further in this direction, adopting the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, instead of the ultra-conservative schema "On the Sources of Revelation" that originally had been submitted. While it stated that Scripture teaches "solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation," Brown points out the ambiguity of this statement, which opened the way for a new interpretation of inerrancy by shifting from a literal interpretation of the text towards a focus on "the extent to which it conforms to the salvific purpose of God". He saw this as the Church 'turning the corner' on inerrancy, while adopting a face-saving wording: "the Roman Catholic Church does not change her official stance in a blunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time. ... What was really going on was an attempt gracefully to retain what was salvageable from the past and to move in a new direction at the same time". While the document cited the two earlier encyclicals, it was clear to observers that much had changed. The Second Vatican Council, one scholar observed, "raised biblical exegesis from the status of second-class citizenship to which it had been reduced among Catholics by an overreaction to the Protestant claim for its autonomy."

Brown has been described as "the premier Johannine scholar in the English-speaking world." Terrence T. Prendergast stated that "for nearly 40 years Father Brown caught the entire church up into the excitement and new possibilities of scriptural scholarship." Much of Brown's work was given a Nihil obstat and an Imprimatur (the "nihil obstat" is a statement by an official reviewer, appointed by a bishop, that "nothing stands in the way" of a book being given an imprimatur; the "imprimatur," which must normally be issued by a bishop of the diocese of publication, is the official endorsement - "let it be printed" - that a book contains nothing damaging to Catholic faith and morals). Brown was the expert appointed to review and provide the nihil obstat for The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, the standard basic reference book for Catholic Biblical studies, of which he was one of the editors and to which he himself contributed, as did dozens of other Catholic scholars.

Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who has written presenting the infancy narratives and John's Gospel as historically reliable, was personally complimentary of Brown and his scholarship, and has been quoted as saying he "would be very happy if we had many exegetes like Father Brown".

Some of the best known of his more than thirty-five books on the Bible are three volumes in the Anchor Bible series on the Gospel and Epistles of John, as well as the Anchor Bible Reference Library volumes The Birth of the Messiah, The Death of the Messiah, and An Introduction to the New Testament, winner of the 1998 Catholic Press Association Award for Biblical Studies. Father Brown's untimely death on August 8, 1998, saddened all who knew him.