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Reading the Gospels with the Church: From Christmas Through Easter
What is the best way to get interested in Bible reading? Why not start with the passages that the Church reads to us in the seasons dedicated to the great events in the life of Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, Easter? That would truly be Reading the Gospels with the Church . This book with its reflections on the Gospels of these seasons offers a wonderful entry into appreciation of the Bible. And since many mainline Churches have the same Gospel readings on Sundays, it is a book that can serve all.
90 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1996
21 people want to read
About the author
Raymond E. Brown
138 books102 followersRoman Catholic priest, member of Society of Saint-Sulpice and a prominent biblical scholar, esteemed by not only his colleagues of the same confession. One of the first Roman Catholic scholars to apply historical-critical analysis to the Bible.
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April 28, 2025
“Reading the Gospels With the Church” Raymond E. Brown, 1996
Raymond Brown’s book is a necessary and useful primer on how to be a Catholic in today’s modern world. He starts by writing about the Catholic Church’s slow incorporation of the methods of historical and literary analysis to better understand the Bible. In 1943 Pope Pius XII reversed the traditional Catholic interpretation of the Bible away from a strict literalist view. He determined it was “safe” (p.4) for Catholic scholars to use modern methods of Biblical analysis, previously forbidden. The Catholics were finally moved by “the pressure of evidence.”
It is fascinating to see the author explain the evolution of the Church’s position from a retro, literalist view of biblical events and people under Pope Leo XIII (1893) to a more enlightened way of analyzing and understanding the Bible under Pope Pius XII (1943). The Second Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII continued Pope Pius’s enlightened interpretation of the Bible. The Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission (started 1948) issued an “Instruction” in 1965 which struck a balance between the biblical literalists and the non-literalist biblical scholars, explaining the three stages of Gospel formation:
1. The ministry of Jesus 2. The preaching of the apostles 3. The writing by the evangelists (10).
The Commission let go of the Catholic church’s traditional literalism saying that “ the Gospels, while retaining the sense of the sayings of Jesus, were not necessarily expressing them literally” (5-6). The Commission maintained that the Gospels were not written for historical purposes “but were preached so as to offer the Church a basis of faith and morals” (6). At the same time the Church Commission reiterated the Church’s inerrancy on its interpretation that the Scriptures contain without error “that truth that God wanted put into the sacred writings for…our salvation”(6).
Brown’s book makes one wonder how Jesus’ words and life evolved into the finished product of today’s Bible. The early church, and particularly the Bible, appear as very human, fragile creations, which could have gone in any of a hundred different directions, but gradually and incredibly developed into meta-human institutions. In the stage two of the gospel formation, what did the apostles remember, omit, emphasize and/or change when recalling the life and words of their leader, i.e., the Messiah, when they were preaching and spreading his Word to all nations? Their memories shaped their proclamations and stories, which served as the source material for stage three, where Jesus’ remembered words and message of salvation are transmitted again to the 4 evangelists. Each transmission takes us a step further from our source and adds a layer of reinterpretation.
Each evangelist had his own unique assembly of followers, which could extend way beyond the Jews of Israel to the Gentiles of all nations - and beyond Hebrew and Aramaic to languages that Jesus, a small-town Galilean Jew, never used. These varied audiences shaped the evangelists’ writing to make the Jesus message clear and meaningful to them. They may have taken certain liberties to bring others of a different culture to the evangelists’ total faith in Jesus and in his message of salvation through him. Their unique views and audiences contributed to a New Testament that is a multi-facetted diamond viewing Jesus’ life from different angles, with different details and different emphases. These resulting divergences do not need to be reconciled because each one, that made the cut, adds to the Bible’s richness, its depth and its lasting relevance. Brown writes, “Harmonization, instead of enriching, impoverishes”(19).
Brown’s book is interesting because it points out the important connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament as well as the overlooked connections the four Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. It is easy to fall into traps of simplicity or bias and end up with serious misconceptions that can be harmful. Brown provides helpful guidance to avoid such traps. Curiously, in all the books of the NT only Matthew and Luke write about the birth of Jesus, and the two of them provide strikingly different accounts. Rather than looking at the conflicting details of each Gospel it is useful to look at what they agree on: 1. The identity of Jesus 2. The way Jesus sums up the history of Israel (p.24).
Both Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus has a dual identity being both the Son of Man, genealogically connected to King David, and the Son of God, not conceived through sexual relations but through the “creative power of the Holy Spirit” (24). This dual identity is the basis of the Good News of the New Testament and stated explicitly or implicitly throughout by all the writers.
Both Luke and Matthew start their Gospels in the New Testament by connecting them directly to the Old Testament(OT) tracing Jesus’ birth through his father, Joseph, back to the House of David. Matthew’s genealogy connects Jesus to an array of significant and insignificant OT characters, each one referring to different aspects of Jesus’ personality and ministry. Matthew’s Gospel continues to refer to OT characters, events, images and quotations throughout- like the Magus and the Magi, Egypt, Joseph, the wicked pharaoh and the wicked King Herod, the star from the east. Matthew reinforces this connection between the old and the new with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah concerning Jesus’ birth: “The virgin shall be with child and give birth to a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14) (p. 29 in Brown).
Old Testament themes are seen as well throughout Luke’s infancy narratives but with different details. It is not necessary to reconcile the differences in the two stories but to treat each one separately, each with its own relevance. Brown explains, “ …there is a whole range of possibilities , including imaginative retellings that have a kernel of fact” (23).
The author compares and contrasts the 4 different Passion stories of Jesus’ crucifixion in each Gospel and in Luke’s Acts, and, as earlier, Brown helpfully points out the uniqueness of each portrayal and the common ideas they agree upon. These chapters are full of astute observations and unique insights, but I want to concentrate on a subject that Christians often ignore or dismiss: the Anti-Judaism that can result from reading the New Testament. Any sensitive reader of the New Testament (NT) will immediately pick up on the anti-Jewish elements seen in parts of the Gospels. The Christian fundamentalist simply relies on the literal words in the Bible and thinks of the Jews as scheming, hateful people who pushed the Romans into arresting and crucifying an innocent Jesus. On the other side, some modern scholars deny Jesus’ crucifixion as a historical event and maintain it is a fabrication based on OT imagery intended “… to vilify the [innocent, law-abiding] Jews” (56). They view Christianity as a false and hateful religion.
The author helpfully breaks down the development of the attitudes towards Jesus’ death that led to Anti-Judaism. The first stage is the historicity of Jesus' death based on the accounts of the evangelists and corroborated to a certain extent by the Jewish historian Josephus (58). The second stage is the Christian interpretation of this horrific death. It is heavily influenced by stories and images from the OT like the “suffering servant” in Isaiah and the common OT story of “the wicked who plot against the innocent” (59) seen in the story of Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, or in the reaction of the crowds to the prophet Jeremiah or the wicked King Antiochus in the Hanukkah story. Raymond Brown maintains that the 4 evangelists were not anti-Jewish in their portrayal of Jesus’ Passion. They were simply using standard Jewish story-telling techniques to merge Jesus’ death closely with OT stories and images that the people were familiar with to convince them that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah, long prophesied by the great prophets.
The third stage in the development of Christian attitudes towards Jews is how the early Christians viewed the Jews versus how they viewed the Romans. Paul’s Jewish-Christian followers had a negative view of the Jews, who reacted with hostility to Paul and to his followers (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, p. 60 in Brown). At this same time the early Christians also had a negative view of the Romans. According to all four Gospels, the Romans cruelly abused Jesus worse than the Jews had.
In stage 4, time has passed and the term “Jews” started to refer to another people, distinct from the believers in Jesus. These Jewish “others” were blamed for Jesus’ death. Brown points out that Matthew’s antagonism towards the Jews may have been influenced by Josephus’ history of Jerusalem written around the time Matthew was writing his Gospel. Brown quotes Josephus: “God turned away from Jerusalem and allowed the Romans to burn the city because of hate for the impiety, murders and profanation among Jews there in the 50’s and 60’s” (61). This hostility between the Christians and the Jews is picked up by the evangelist John, who writes that the Jews adamantly opposed Pilate’s willingness to release Jesus and insisted on his crucifixion (John 19:15). Some modern scholars want to excise from the NT any references that inculpate the Jews, but Brown is against this kind of censorship. He prefers providing a historical context of the offensive language to explore the biases of the writers and the social and political problems during this early Christian era.
This anti-Judaism grew through the centuries, not abated enough by the Church, and Christians began to accuse Jews of deicide. During the Nazi period, Christians “read the Passion story in a way that fueled hatred of the Jews”(63), which contributed to the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust. Today the Christian churches have to be very intentional in combatting anti-Semitism in interpreting the Bible and in speaking to their members of the interdependency of the Christians and Jews. Pope John Paul II in 1995 spoke out plainly and forcefully: “Never again anti-Semitism!”
Brown’s book is very useful for any Christian trying to understand the Bible and live out his/her faith in these secular times, when our traditional religion and ways are challenged by technology, by modern scholarship and even by biblical fundamentalists. The author takes into account the recent historicity of modern biblical analysis but still emphasizes the important role of divinity in explaining the phenomenal growth of the Bible and Christianity. It is not simply a human phenomena of popularity or simply caused by the law of supply and demand or achieved through a technological development like the printing press. It is the divine! In these modern and challenging times of superficiality, it is refreshing that the author reacquaints the reader with this ancient and mysterious concept that is so quickly and derisively dismissed by the moderns, who cannot see beyond the obvious, measurable, material world, simply governed by the laws of nature. Brown describes the improbable rise of the Gospels: “The Gospels are what was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guided the process of Gospel formation, guaranteeing that the end-product Gospels reflect the truth that God sent Jesus to proclaim” (19). Amen!
Raymond Brown’s book is a necessary and useful primer on how to be a Catholic in today’s modern world. He starts by writing about the Catholic Church’s slow incorporation of the methods of historical and literary analysis to better understand the Bible. In 1943 Pope Pius XII reversed the traditional Catholic interpretation of the Bible away from a strict literalist view. He determined it was “safe” (p.4) for Catholic scholars to use modern methods of Biblical analysis, previously forbidden. The Catholics were finally moved by “the pressure of evidence.”
It is fascinating to see the author explain the evolution of the Church’s position from a retro, literalist view of biblical events and people under Pope Leo XIII (1893) to a more enlightened way of analyzing and understanding the Bible under Pope Pius XII (1943). The Second Vatican Council under Pope John XXIII continued Pope Pius’s enlightened interpretation of the Bible. The Roman Pontifical Biblical Commission (started 1948) issued an “Instruction” in 1965 which struck a balance between the biblical literalists and the non-literalist biblical scholars, explaining the three stages of Gospel formation:
1. The ministry of Jesus 2. The preaching of the apostles 3. The writing by the evangelists (10).
The Commission let go of the Catholic church’s traditional literalism saying that “ the Gospels, while retaining the sense of the sayings of Jesus, were not necessarily expressing them literally” (5-6). The Commission maintained that the Gospels were not written for historical purposes “but were preached so as to offer the Church a basis of faith and morals” (6). At the same time the Church Commission reiterated the Church’s inerrancy on its interpretation that the Scriptures contain without error “that truth that God wanted put into the sacred writings for…our salvation”(6).
Brown’s book makes one wonder how Jesus’ words and life evolved into the finished product of today’s Bible. The early church, and particularly the Bible, appear as very human, fragile creations, which could have gone in any of a hundred different directions, but gradually and incredibly developed into meta-human institutions. In the stage two of the gospel formation, what did the apostles remember, omit, emphasize and/or change when recalling the life and words of their leader, i.e., the Messiah, when they were preaching and spreading his Word to all nations? Their memories shaped their proclamations and stories, which served as the source material for stage three, where Jesus’ remembered words and message of salvation are transmitted again to the 4 evangelists. Each transmission takes us a step further from our source and adds a layer of reinterpretation.
Each evangelist had his own unique assembly of followers, which could extend way beyond the Jews of Israel to the Gentiles of all nations - and beyond Hebrew and Aramaic to languages that Jesus, a small-town Galilean Jew, never used. These varied audiences shaped the evangelists’ writing to make the Jesus message clear and meaningful to them. They may have taken certain liberties to bring others of a different culture to the evangelists’ total faith in Jesus and in his message of salvation through him. Their unique views and audiences contributed to a New Testament that is a multi-facetted diamond viewing Jesus’ life from different angles, with different details and different emphases. These resulting divergences do not need to be reconciled because each one, that made the cut, adds to the Bible’s richness, its depth and its lasting relevance. Brown writes, “Harmonization, instead of enriching, impoverishes”(19).
Brown’s book is interesting because it points out the important connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament as well as the overlooked connections the four Gospels and the other books of the New Testament. It is easy to fall into traps of simplicity or bias and end up with serious misconceptions that can be harmful. Brown provides helpful guidance to avoid such traps. Curiously, in all the books of the NT only Matthew and Luke write about the birth of Jesus, and the two of them provide strikingly different accounts. Rather than looking at the conflicting details of each Gospel it is useful to look at what they agree on: 1. The identity of Jesus 2. The way Jesus sums up the history of Israel (p.24).
Both Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus has a dual identity being both the Son of Man, genealogically connected to King David, and the Son of God, not conceived through sexual relations but through the “creative power of the Holy Spirit” (24). This dual identity is the basis of the Good News of the New Testament and stated explicitly or implicitly throughout by all the writers.
Both Luke and Matthew start their Gospels in the New Testament by connecting them directly to the Old Testament(OT) tracing Jesus’ birth through his father, Joseph, back to the House of David. Matthew’s genealogy connects Jesus to an array of significant and insignificant OT characters, each one referring to different aspects of Jesus’ personality and ministry. Matthew’s Gospel continues to refer to OT characters, events, images and quotations throughout- like the Magus and the Magi, Egypt, Joseph, the wicked pharaoh and the wicked King Herod, the star from the east. Matthew reinforces this connection between the old and the new with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah concerning Jesus’ birth: “The virgin shall be with child and give birth to a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14) (p. 29 in Brown).
Old Testament themes are seen as well throughout Luke’s infancy narratives but with different details. It is not necessary to reconcile the differences in the two stories but to treat each one separately, each with its own relevance. Brown explains, “ …there is a whole range of possibilities , including imaginative retellings that have a kernel of fact” (23).
The author compares and contrasts the 4 different Passion stories of Jesus’ crucifixion in each Gospel and in Luke’s Acts, and, as earlier, Brown helpfully points out the uniqueness of each portrayal and the common ideas they agree upon. These chapters are full of astute observations and unique insights, but I want to concentrate on a subject that Christians often ignore or dismiss: the Anti-Judaism that can result from reading the New Testament. Any sensitive reader of the New Testament (NT) will immediately pick up on the anti-Jewish elements seen in parts of the Gospels. The Christian fundamentalist simply relies on the literal words in the Bible and thinks of the Jews as scheming, hateful people who pushed the Romans into arresting and crucifying an innocent Jesus. On the other side, some modern scholars deny Jesus’ crucifixion as a historical event and maintain it is a fabrication based on OT imagery intended “… to vilify the [innocent, law-abiding] Jews” (56). They view Christianity as a false and hateful religion.
The author helpfully breaks down the development of the attitudes towards Jesus’ death that led to Anti-Judaism. The first stage is the historicity of Jesus' death based on the accounts of the evangelists and corroborated to a certain extent by the Jewish historian Josephus (58). The second stage is the Christian interpretation of this horrific death. It is heavily influenced by stories and images from the OT like the “suffering servant” in Isaiah and the common OT story of “the wicked who plot against the innocent” (59) seen in the story of Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, or in the reaction of the crowds to the prophet Jeremiah or the wicked King Antiochus in the Hanukkah story. Raymond Brown maintains that the 4 evangelists were not anti-Jewish in their portrayal of Jesus’ Passion. They were simply using standard Jewish story-telling techniques to merge Jesus’ death closely with OT stories and images that the people were familiar with to convince them that Jesus was, in fact, the Messiah, long prophesied by the great prophets.
The third stage in the development of Christian attitudes towards Jews is how the early Christians viewed the Jews versus how they viewed the Romans. Paul’s Jewish-Christian followers had a negative view of the Jews, who reacted with hostility to Paul and to his followers (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, p. 60 in Brown). At this same time the early Christians also had a negative view of the Romans. According to all four Gospels, the Romans cruelly abused Jesus worse than the Jews had.
In stage 4, time has passed and the term “Jews” started to refer to another people, distinct from the believers in Jesus. These Jewish “others” were blamed for Jesus’ death. Brown points out that Matthew’s antagonism towards the Jews may have been influenced by Josephus’ history of Jerusalem written around the time Matthew was writing his Gospel. Brown quotes Josephus: “God turned away from Jerusalem and allowed the Romans to burn the city because of hate for the impiety, murders and profanation among Jews there in the 50’s and 60’s” (61). This hostility between the Christians and the Jews is picked up by the evangelist John, who writes that the Jews adamantly opposed Pilate’s willingness to release Jesus and insisted on his crucifixion (John 19:15). Some modern scholars want to excise from the NT any references that inculpate the Jews, but Brown is against this kind of censorship. He prefers providing a historical context of the offensive language to explore the biases of the writers and the social and political problems during this early Christian era.
This anti-Judaism grew through the centuries, not abated enough by the Church, and Christians began to accuse Jews of deicide. During the Nazi period, Christians “read the Passion story in a way that fueled hatred of the Jews”(63), which contributed to the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust. Today the Christian churches have to be very intentional in combatting anti-Semitism in interpreting the Bible and in speaking to their members of the interdependency of the Christians and Jews. Pope John Paul II in 1995 spoke out plainly and forcefully: “Never again anti-Semitism!”
Brown’s book is very useful for any Christian trying to understand the Bible and live out his/her faith in these secular times, when our traditional religion and ways are challenged by technology, by modern scholarship and even by biblical fundamentalists. The author takes into account the recent historicity of modern biblical analysis but still emphasizes the important role of divinity in explaining the phenomenal growth of the Bible and Christianity. It is not simply a human phenomena of popularity or simply caused by the law of supply and demand or achieved through a technological development like the printing press. It is the divine! In these modern and challenging times of superficiality, it is refreshing that the author reacquaints the reader with this ancient and mysterious concept that is so quickly and derisively dismissed by the moderns, who cannot see beyond the obvious, measurable, material world, simply governed by the laws of nature. Brown describes the improbable rise of the Gospels: “The Gospels are what was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guided the process of Gospel formation, guaranteeing that the end-product Gospels reflect the truth that God sent Jesus to proclaim” (19). Amen!
October 18, 2023
This was the second time I had read this book. I was much younger when I read it the first time. This go round was not as enlightening. I suppose it might have been more engaging if I had someone to discuss it with.
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