The Work
An Introduction to the New Testament was published in 1997 by Doubleday (New York) as part of the Anchor Bible Reference Library. Raymond E. Brown was completing this volume in the final years of his life; he died in 1998, a year after its publication. The book is approximately 900 pages and covers all twenty-seven books of the New Testament, with chapters on the historical background, Pauline chronology, the canon, and the Greek text. It is dedicated to his students over forty years of teaching at St. Mary's Seminary (Baltimore) and Union Theological Seminary (New York). The Anchor Bible Reference Library edition includes extensive indexes, maps, and bibliographies. It is widely regarded as the single most useful one-volume introduction to the New Testament available in English.
Biblical Engagement
Brown's Introduction is organized canonically: the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, the Johannine literature, the Pauline corpus, the deutero-Pauline epistles, the general epistles, and Revelation. Each section opens with historical-critical questions (authorship, date, provenance, recipients, occasion) before moving to theological analysis.
Brown's treatment of John 1:1 ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God") exemplifies his method. He traces the hymnic structure of John 1:1-18, surveys scholarly hypotheses about its pre-Gospel origins (an early Christian hymn? a creation midrash? a wisdom poem?), analyzes the theological claims of the Logos Christology, and situates the Prologue within the Johannine theological tradition. This combination of literary, historical, and theological analysis gives his commentary unusual depth.
His treatment of Romans 1:16-17 ("For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation... For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith") engages the central debates about Pauline soteriology: the meaning of "righteousness of God" (dikaiosyne theou -- is it an attribute of God or a gift to believers?), the relationship between faith and works in Romans and Galatians, and the New Perspective on Paul's challenge to the traditional Lutheran reading.
Brown's Johannine scholarship -- represented in his two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on John (1966-1970) and his studies of the Johannine community -- is summarized in the Introduction's treatment of the Gospel of John, the three Johannine Epistles, and Revelation. He argues for a distinct "Johannine school" of tradition, originating in the experience of the Beloved Disciple and developing through several stages of composition and community conflict.
Hebrews 1:1-4 ("God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son") receives careful treatment as an example of Jewish homiletical style (midrash) applied to the demonstration of Christ's superiority to angels, Moses, and the Levitical priesthood. Brown's analysis of Hebrews's rhetorical structure and its debt to Alexandrian Jewish exegesis (Philo) is particularly valuable.
Author and Context
Raymond Edward Brown (1928-1998) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Saint Sulpice (Sulpicians). He earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University and studied at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. He taught New Testament at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, and from 1971 to his death at Union Theological Seminary, New York -- a landmark appointment, as one of the first Catholic scholars to hold a position at a major Protestant institution. He was among the most influential Catholic biblical scholars of the twentieth century, appointed twice to the Pontifical Biblical Commission by Pope John Paul II.
Brown's scholarship was shaped by Vatican II's constitution on divine revelation, Dei Verbum (1965), which authorized and encouraged Catholic engagement with historical-critical biblical scholarship. Brown was one of the leading practitioners of this newly authorized approach, applying it with rigor and with theological seriousness. He navigated the tension between historical criticism (which treats the Bible as a human document shaped by historical circumstances) and Catholic faith (which affirms it as the Word of God) with unusual sophistication.
His work on the Infancy Narratives (The Birth of the Messiah, 1977), the Passion Narratives (The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols., 1994), and the Johannine Gospel and Epistles represents the fullest application of historical-critical scholarship to these specific biblical texts in the twentieth century.
Critical Reception
The Introduction received enthusiastic reviews from both Catholic and Protestant scholars. It was praised for its comprehensiveness, its scholarly rigor, its accessibility to students, and its ability to represent the full range of scholarly opinion without becoming merely encyclopedic. Protestant reviewers noted that Brown's Catholic perspective was never sectarian -- his engagement with Protestant scholarship (and with the Orthodox tradition in his later work) was always generous and intellectually serious.
Conservative evangelical critics questioned Brown's acceptance of historical-critical conclusions about the authorship and dating of the deutero-Pauline epistles and the Johannine letters, finding his critical judgments too skeptical. Brown's response was that the tradition of canonical attribution (that Paul wrote Ephesians, Colossians, and the Pastorals) was a theological claim about apostolic authority rather than a straightforwardly historical one, and that accepting a more complex history of composition did not undermine the canonical authority of the texts.
Theological Significance
Brown's Introduction is one of the most important Catholic contributions to Protestant-Catholic biblical dialogue in the twentieth century. By applying historical-critical methods with full rigor while maintaining the theological and canonical significance of the texts, he demonstrated that historical scholarship and Christian faith are not incompatible. His model of "critical fidelity" -- rigorous historical analysis in service of theological understanding -- has been enormously influential.
Legacy
The Introduction remains the standard one-volume reference for New Testament introduction in English and is used in seminaries and universities of multiple denominations. It has been supplemented but not replaced by more recent works (Bart Ehrman's New Testament, Luke Timothy Johnson's Writings of the New Testament). Brown's Johannine scholarship in particular -- his hypothesis of the Johannine community, his analysis of the stages of composition of the Fourth Gospel -- has generated an enormous secondary literature.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers will find Brown's Introduction most illuminating when read alongside the specific texts he discusses: John 1:1-18 (the Prologue), Romans 1-8 (the structure of Pauline soteriology), Hebrews 1-4 (the theological argument), the Johannine Epistles, and Revelation 1-3 (the letters to the seven churches).
Further Reading
- Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (1977; updated 1993) -- his specialized study of Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. - Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah (2 vols., 1994) -- his comprehensive analysis of the Passion Narratives. - Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament (3rd ed., 2010) -- a valuable complement, representing a different critical perspective.