Raymond Brown

Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, who has argued that the infancy narratives and John’s Gospel are historically reliable, was personally complimentary of Brown and his scholarship, and said that he "would be very happy if we had many exegetes like Father Brown".

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".

Brown identified three layers of text in John: 1) an initial version Brown considers based on personal experience of Jesus; 2) a structured literary creation by the evangelist which draws upon additional sources; and 3) the edited version that readers know today (Brown 1979).

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 Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he taught from 1971 to 1990, when he retired with the title of Professor Emeritus. He served as the President of the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature (1976–77), and the Society of New Testament Studies (1986–87). Widely regarded as one of America's preeminent biblical scholars, Brown was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees by universities in the United States and Europe—many from Protestant institutions.

Following his studies, Brown taught at his alma mater, St. Mary's Seminary, until 1971. During this period he was invited to work as a research fellow at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, where he worked on a concordance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1963 he served as a peritus (expert adviser) to the Bishop of St. Augustine, Joseph P. Hurley, at the Second Vatican Council.

In a detailed 1965 article in the journal Theological Studies 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."

Born in New York City, the son of Robert H. and Loretta Brown, Raymond studied at the Catholic University of America where he received a bachelor's degree in 1948 and a Master of Arts degree in 1949 as a Basselin scholar. In 1951 he joined the scholarly Society of Saint-Sulpice following his reception of a Bachelor in Sacred Theology degree from St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1953 he was ordained a Catholic priest for the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida. He earned the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology from St. Mary's Seminary in 1955 and a second doctorate in Semitic languages in 1958 from Johns Hopkins University, where one of his advisors was William F. Albright.

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, Pius XII's 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 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: "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."

Raymond Edward Brown SS (May 22, 1928 – August 8, 1998) was an American Catholic priest, a member of the Sulpician Fathers and a prominent biblical scholar. He was regarded as a specialist concerning the hypothetical "Johannine community", which he speculated contributed to the authorship of the Gospel of John, and he also wrote influential studies on the birth and death of Jesus. Brown was professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in New York where he taught for 29 years. He was the first Catholic professor to gain tenure there, where he earned a reputation as a superior lecturer.

He was an actor, known for Allan Quatermain (1919), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Beyond the Law (1934).

Raymond Brown was born on August 16, 1874 in Champaign, Illinois, USA.