The Demise of Catholic Scripture Scholarship

The turning point, as the introduction tells it, came under Pius XII. Divino Afflante Spiritu opened the tools of historical criticism to Catholic exegetes, and the method is not bad in itself: it asks of a document who wrote it, when, from what sources, under what cultural pressure, and those are fair questions to put to a sonnet, a Greek tragedy or the United States Constitution. What happened next is the subject of the book. Liberal scholars who had been dissenting since the late 1800s took up the method, and in the higher echelons of Catholic scholarship hardly anything the Bible says is now taken at face value.

Fr. Raymond Brown is the central figure, treated over several chapters along with his critics and his other works. Around him the book traces the origins of historical criticism, the quest for the historical Jesus, the method's own limitations, what Vatican II did and did not say about biblical inerrancy, Fr. Brown's role in the 1964 Pontifical Biblical Commission instruction, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on biblical interpretation. The connection it presses is a direct one: when a Catholic today doubts the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, the doubt usually has a traceable pedigree.