(RNS) — John P. Meier, a theologian and biblical commentator whose multi-volume “A Marginal Jew” transformed the Catholic approach to critical historical research into the life of Jesus and religious faith, died Tuesday (Oct. 18) in South Bend, Indiana.
He was 80 years old.
Meier was born in the Bronx, New York, on Aug. 8, 1942. He entered New York City’s archdiocesan seminary for college and studied for the priesthood at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, New York, just outside of Yonkers. After graduating in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, Meier studied at the historic Jesuit university in Rome, the Gregorian.
A priest in the Archdiocese of New York, he was ordained in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on December 21, 1967. He received a doctorate in sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1976.
After a stint at a parish church in Bronxville, Meier returned to Dunwoodie Seminary in 1972 to teach and eventually served as the chair of the seminary’s Scripture studies department before transferring to the pontifical university in the United States, the Catholic University of America, in 1984. He taught for almost 15 years at the Catholic University of America before taking up a post at the University of Notre Dame in 1998. He retired after 20 years in Notre Dame’s theology department, in June 2018.
Meier’s fame derived primarily from his “A Marginal Jew,” first published in 1991, which presented a new perspective on “historical Jesus studies.”
“A Marginal Jew” opens with the thought experiment of an “un-papal conclave” in which a Catholic, Protestant Christian, Jewish, Muslim and agnostic scholar are locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School until they come to a conclusion: a collective white paper on what they can each agree on about Jesus of Nazareth purely on historical grounds and reasoning based on the texts and records available.
The book, which was expanded to five volumes, attempted to trace the outlines of the conclusions that could result from an interreligious “conclave.”
During the European enlightenment, in the 17th to 19th centuries, scholars applied the burgeoning fields of historiography and the scientific method to the texts of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Beginning with the German philosopher Hermann Reimarus in the 18th century, these scholars began to distinguish between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.”
The first systematic quest for a historical Jesus began with German theologian Albert Schweitzer in 1906. Schweitzer published a book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede,” which attempted to evaluate and synthesize portraits of the historical Jesus then in existence.
The “historical Jesus” that emerged from these works generally took the shape of a Jewish prophet and preacher who had lived, worked, preached, gained a sizable following and died at the hands of the Romans. According to this approach to biblical studies, the subsequent deification of this Jesus into God had taken place after his death and was a product of his disciples and could not be traced back to the historical figure.
“A Marginal Jew” volumes. Courtesy image
Meier’s work started a new wave of historical Jesus scholarship.
