How did the modernist scholar Raymond Brown gain such popularity?

He spent most of his time trying to show the Bible was not true in what it said. Here is how he got away with it: instead of coming right out and saying the virgin birth was not true, which would never have passed muster with his Catholic authorities, he would ask, 'Is the virgin birth true?' You cannot excommunicate a man merely for asking a question, and he played that to the hilt, showing no shame about putting a major doctrine in the form of a question, though everyone knows the answer is yes and, if pressed with his job on the line, he would admit it. In my opinion he was probably the biggest heretic the Catholic Church has ever known, and remember, on this show you get my opinion. He taught not at a Catholic seminary but at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the most liberal Protestant seminary in the world; I think he was a walking Protestant in Catholic garb. He deceived people up until his death in 1998 and threw the 1960s, 70s, and 80s into turmoil, and many who followed him are still turning the Church upside down. But do not ever leave the Church because of men like that; fight them within the Church while you are alive, because it is still Jesus' Church, and He predicted this apostasy, the falling away that 2 Thessalonians 2 speaks of.