The publication of Raymond Brown's The Gospel according to John (1966–1970) in Doubleday's Anchor Bible commentary series was both main event and feature of coming attractions for biblical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century.¹

The commentary established Brown as a star among New Testament scholars, and augured a string of exhaustively researched volumes written in accessible prose. A Catholic religious who taught for years at Saint Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Brown went on to become Auburn Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Though ensconced in that bastion of liberal Protestantism, Brown was the only American member of Pope Paul VI's Pontifical Biblical Commission from 1972 to 1978; Pope John Paul II tapped him for the Commission again in 1996 and Brown remained a member until his death. Brown was president of the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Society for the Study of the New Testament, the three most prestigious professional societies for biblical studies; and he was the first person to have been president of all three. Time magazine hailed him “probably the premier Catholic scholar in the U.S.”

Brown was a perennial draw on the lecture circuit and wrote several popular treatments. Yet he was ever the scholar's scholar, widely respected in the guild of New Testament studies for the erudition and sheer heft of his masterworks: The Birth of the Messiah, The Death of the Messiah, and An Introduction to the New Testament.²

Brown died in 1998, while revising his commentary on the Gospel of John.

It is in the study of John's Gospel that Brown has left the richest of a rich scholarly legacy. Few modern scholars had read the text of the Gospel of John with such gravity, judiciousness, and sophistication, and it now remained for someone else to bring those same virtues to the text of Raymond Brown. That someone would be Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B., Katherine Drexel Chair for Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a distinguished New Testament scholar in his own right. Ronald Witherup, S.S., the Provincial of the Sulpician Fathers in the United States, invited Moloney to prepare a posthumous edition of Brown's work. An Introduction to the Gospel of John is the recently published fruit of Moloney's learned labors.

The book's table of contents promises Brown's characteristically panoramic view of Johannine studies. The book's nine chapters cover the waterfront: an overview of Johannine studies, theories of composition, development of Johannine tradition, formative religious influences, and Johannine theology and apologetics, in addition to questions of language, style, dating, text, and the outline of the Gospel. Brown's command of the enormous secondary literature treating the Gospel of John was encyclopedic. For the most part biblical scholars have and may continue to rely on Brown's survey of the literature for much if not all the news that's fit to print in Johannine studies. In this Moloney follows in the master's footsteps by providing updated bibliographies and observations on important scholarly trends.

But here we encounter at the same time the breadth and limits of Brown's bibliographical ecumenism. What Brown read is not always reflected in what he said; certain theological bandwidths don't show up on the spectrum of either Brown or Maloney in this Introduction. Though the commentary of Mateos and Barreto and Rensberger's Johannine Faith and Liberating Community are in the bibliography, there is no engagement of Liberation Theology.

³

(The translation in El Evangelio de Juan of

as “el projeto” is every bit as remarkable as Goethe's gloss, “In Anfang war die Tat.”) It is impossible, of course, for anyone—even Raymond Brown, and, standing upon that giant's shoulders, Francis Moloney—to engage everything, and any overview of modern Johannine scholarship is bound to overlook something. But these omissions are significant because they suggest that ideological blind spots limit the reach and grasp of Brown's work.

Moloney suggests that had he had more time to refine his work Brown “would have broken the mold of Johannine scholarship.”⁴

I doubt it. Yes, Brown was occasionally controversial to “Catholic traditionalists”; but being to the left of antimodernist reactionaries is not being very far to the left. Brown's personal orthodoxy kept him in the theological center of Catholicism, and nothing that he read in the New Testament or any of its commentators, ancient or modern, compromised that commitment.

Brown himself had become a distinguished pillar in whatever could be called the scholarly consensus in Johannine studies. And that consensus is basically centrist, with plenty of room for traditional answers to critical questions. Brown's commentary was such an event in the late 1960s because, in addition to its inherent merits, it was the definitive post–Vatican II response to the work of the universally influential liberal Protestant scholar Rudolf Bultmann.

Bultmann's commentary on the Gospel of John was a shock from which New Testament scholarship in some ways has yet to recover.⁵

Bultmann proposed that the Gospel had been ingeniously woven together from several sources by a gnostic former follower of John the Baptist. The Evangelist's work subsequently fell into disarray, evinced by the gaps and unevenness still discernible in the narrative as we have it. Though the damage could not be completely undone, a later hand endeavored to put the pieces back together. Bultmann called this ambitious editor the Ecclesiastical Redactor, and it is to him that we owe the Gospel in its present form. Not content to smooth out the narrative wrinkles, some of which were beyond his powers or interest to correct, the Ecclesiastical Redactor went about bowdlerizing the text so that it might be more acceptable to what was then emerging as Christian orthodoxy. Hostile to the incipient Gnosticism of his sources, he was a doctrinaire and occasionally ruthless editor. He tried to harmonize some events in the narrative with what he knew of the other three canonical Gospels, added sacramental language, and insinuated references to the Second Coming of Christ. The resultant final version of the Gospel, Bultmann argued, then passed muster with the orthodox early church.

Bultmann's commentary remains controversial, and many of his proposals for solving the problems of the Gospel have been widely rejected. But Bultmann's enduring contribution has been more the questions he raised than the answers he offered for them. Those questions henceforth set the agenda for critical Johannine scholarship from his day to our own. In his original commentary and in the new Introduction, Brown engages Bultmann throughout, and the indices of the respective volumes show that Bultmann is mentioned more frequently in Brown's pages than any other single commentator.

According to Brown's alternative theory of the Gospel's composition, an evangelist who was acquainted with an eyewitness to Jesus' ministry and the ensuing apostolic period “composed the body of the existing Gospel.”⁶

A redactor who was a “co-disciple” of the evangelist then edited the evangelist's draft. “I particularly wish to avoid Bultmann's terminology ‘Ecclesiastical Redactor,’” writes Brown, “because I do not think of this figure as correcting the evangelist's gospel.”⁷ Brown's redactor did not change what the Evangelist wrote, but supplemented it with other early tradition that included sacramental vocabulary and extended discourses. Brown thereby leavens Bultmann's radical criticism with concern for apostolic authority, sacrament, and other traditional sensibilities that allow biblical scholarship to offer theological conservatives a more user-friendly historical criticism than that of Bultmann.

And it is in this turn of intellectual history that the Introduction becomes an ironic text. It is its own premier instance of the problem of attributing contradiction in a text to different authors, and at the same time an object lesson in just how heavy-handed an editor can be. To Brown's nine chapters Moloney has added not only an “Editor's Introduction” but also an “Editor's Conclusion.” The first and last word, the prologue and epilogue, are thus Moloney's. He writes in the editor's conclusion” that “[Brown's] partially completed script, spanning some 30 years (1966-98), was itself highlighted by a number of tensions and non sequiturs.”⁸

Moloney goes on to say, “there are several places … where completely new material was added to the original text. Necessarily, this process of reworking an older text in a somewhat piecemeal fashion creates literary and even theological tensions. I have tried to cover most of them by means of editor's notes, and there are places where, respectfully, I altered Brown's text.”⁹ Both Brown and Moloney disagree with Bultmann's hypothesis of a disdainful ecclesiastical redactor at odds with the text he is editing. But the intellectual relationship of Brown and Moloney unintentionally corroborates the plausibility of Bultmann's thesis, for Moloney is at odds with Brown throughout the book. Though Moloney says he “generally left Brown's text untouched,” he flags his several disagreements with Brown in editorial notes.

And there are a lot of notes in this book. In a footnote Brown disagrees with Moloney's understanding of the term “Son of Man,” and Moloney appends to Brown's footnote an editor's note answering Brown's criticisms.¹⁰

Moloney also takes issue with Brown's use of the word “replacement” to describe Jesus' relation to Jewish institutions in lieu of Moloney's more accurate if not more theologically politic notion of fulfillment.¹¹ When Brown suggests that Jesus' critique in John 10 may be “aimed at Christian shepherds,” Moloney writes in an editor's note: “There are very few contemporary Johannine scholars today who would take that position,” and then goes on to cite one of his own monographs.¹² In the first edition of his work, Brown subscribed to patristic tradition's identification of John, the author of Revelation, with the same John to whom the Gospel and the letters of John are attributed. But in An Introduction, Brown admits, “Subsequent reflection has convinced me that this is methodologically unwise.”¹³ Yet when elsewhere in a footnote Brown warns against assuming that the eschatology of the two texts is “contradictory,” Moloney appends to this footnote a note of his own: “Brown's use of Revelation to draw literary and theological conclusions about the Gospel of John was also inconsistent, showing a blend of his confident use of Revelation in 1966–70 and his acceptance of current scholarship, judging against a close relationship in 1998.”¹⁴ Of the several editorial notes and asides in the Gospel of John, none is as disputatious as this.

Ultimately the literary relationship between Brown and Moloney may better suggest the relation of author to editor than Bultmann's conception of the evangelist and the ham-fisted redactor. Critical distance, Michael Walzer once observed, is measured in inches. Moloney is a Catholic and a religious, as was Brown. And both pursued careers in biblical scholarship in an era marked at one end by the Second Vatican Council and at the other by John Paul II. Moloney writes in the editor's introduction that Brown was a colleague he held in the highest esteem; he was deeply honored to have been asked to edit Brown's final opus, a request made by the provincial of Brown's religious order. The Roman Catholic Church, in effect, summoned Moloney to his editorial work. And so Moloney is both “co-disciple” and Ecclesiastical Redactor.

The editor's conclusion compounds the irony of the book, for there it becomes clear that Moloney's edition of Brown calls into question the very need to posit an evangelist and an editor to account for the inconsistencies in the text of the Gospel. Moloney has eyeballed both the inconsistencies of Brown's text and those of the Gospel of John. “If Brown's own work—obviously the work of a single author working on the same material across a span of 30 years—can reflect … tensions and internal contradictions,” Moloney writes in the Editor's Conclusion, “is it necessary to develop a hypothesis involving a series of different authors … to explain the composition history of the Gospel of John that will demonstrate these tensions and internal contradictions?”¹⁵

This one question challenges any theory of complex Johannine redaction, including those proposed by Bultmann and Brown.

As Raymond Brown wrote in the 1966 preface to his commentary, and as Moloney reminds us on page one of the editor's introduction, Brown sought to balance his “moderately critical” scholarship with “a stubborn refusal to make a biblical text say more than its author meant to say.” An Introduction to the Gospel of John enacts the tensions within authors and between authors more vividly than any theory of Johannine redaction, and in so doing no doubt tells us much more than its author meant to say.