Raymond Brown's An Introduction to the New Testament (1997) was published in the final years of his life and represents the synthesis of a career that made him the most important Catholic New Testament scholar of the twentieth century. The 878-page volume treats all twenty-seven New Testament books with comprehensive attention to authorship, date, background, composition, and theological contribution, and it became almost immediately the standard textbook for graduate New Testament study in Catholic institutions and was widely adopted in mainline Protestant seminaries as well.
Brown was a Sulpician priest who taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York - a Protestant institution - for many years, an arrangement that illustrated both his ecumenical commitments and his scholarly stature. His willingness to bring the full toolkit of historical-critical scholarship - source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, historical analysis - to the New Testament while maintaining orthodox Catholic commitments made him a model for post-Vatican II Catholic biblical scholarship and something of a lightning rod for conservative critics who thought the historical method was corrosive to faith.
The Introduction's treatment of John 1:1-18 - the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel - draws on Brown's massive two-volume Anchor Bible commentary on John (1966, 1970) and his later study The Community of the Beloved Disciple (1979). Brown argued that the Prologue was a hymn that predated the Gospel, adapted and incorporated by the evangelist, whose exalted Christology - 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' - represents the development of the earliest Christian reflection on Jesus's divine status.
The treatment of the Pauline letters addresses the complex question of authorship with characteristic balance: Brown distinguished between the undisputed letters (Romans 1:1 through the authentic Paulines) and the deuteropauline letters (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastorals) attributed by many scholars to later followers of Paul, explaining the scholarly evidence for each position without claiming more certainty than the evidence warrants.
Revelation 1:1's introduction to 'the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place' receives extensive treatment in which Brown situated the book in the context of first-century Roman imperial ideology and Jewish apocalyptic tradition, resisting both the dispensationalist readings that dominate popular Protestant interpretation and the purely literary demystifications that ignore the book's pastoral intent for persecuted communities.
Brown's broader contribution to twentieth-century biblical scholarship extends well beyond this Introduction to include The Birth of the Messiah (1977, revised 1993), which remains the standard scholarly treatment of Matthew 1:1-2:23 and Luke 1:1-2:52; The Death of the Messiah (1994), a two-volume Passion narrative commentary; and numerous specialized studies on Johannine theology and community.
His influence on Catholic biblical education has been decisive. Before Brown and the generation of scholars he represented, Catholic biblical scholarship was constrained by a suspicion of historical-critical method rooted in the Modernist crisis of the early twentieth century. Vatican II's Dei Verbum (1965) opened the door to historical methods, and Brown walked through it with the full confidence of a man who believed that honest scholarship would confirm rather than undermine orthodox faith. His career demonstrated the possibility - contested but real - of combining rigorous historical scholarship with committed Christian faith.
The Introduction won the Catholic Press Association's award for best theological work and has been used in hundreds of seminaries and graduate programs. It was published posthumously: Brown died of a heart attack while completing final revisions in August 1998, and the book appeared that same year.
Brown's treatment of the Pauline corpus - distinguishing between the undisputed letters (Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon) and the deuteropauline letters (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastorals) - provides one of the clearest expositions of the historical-critical method in New Testament scholarship. He does not argue that the deuteropauline letters are therefore uninspired or uncanonical; he argues that understanding their historical context - as letters written in Paul's name by disciples who sought to apply his teaching to new situations - illuminates their theological content and explains features that are otherwise puzzling. This careful position has been influential in Catholic biblical scholarship, which has been more comfortable than some Protestant traditions with the idea that canonical authority does not require Pauline authorship of every letter attributed to Paul.
An Introduction to the New Testament has been the standard seminary text in New Testament introduction for Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and many evangelical institutions for three decades. Its influence on a generation of ministers and biblical scholars - its shaping of how the New Testament is read, taught, and preached in thousands of congregations - is a form of biblical influence that is less visible than a best-selling devotional but no less real. Brown's commitment to bringing the best of modern scholarship into the service of the Church's reading of scripture remains a model for what responsible academic theology can look like.
An Introduction to the New Testament has been the standard seminary text in New Testament introduction for Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and many evangelical institutions for three decades. Its influence on a generation of ministers and biblical scholars - its shaping of how the New Testament is read, taught, and preached in thousands of congregations - is a form of biblical influence that is less visible than a best-selling devotional but no less real. Brown's commitment to bringing the best of modern scholarship into the service of the Church's reading of scripture remains a model for what responsible academic theology can look like.