When Fr John P Meier died in October 2022, the world lost a renowned Catholic biblical scholar – whose ambitious, multi-volume project, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, was praised by Pope Benedict XVI as “outstanding both in its thoroughness and its accuracy” and a “model of historical-critical exegesis.” Meier was the prototypical Catholic scholar: humble, dedicated, painstaking and pious.
Meier deftly articulated his vision for the project in the introduction to its second volume, subtitled Mentor, Message and Miracles. He lamented that many considerations of the historical Jesus – the attempt to document the life of Jesus via the tools of history rather than theology – ignored or brushed past Jesus’s miracles. Josephus, the 1st-century Jewish historian, described Jesus as a “doer of startling deeds”.
For Meier, it is especially important that Josephus – who had little to say about Jesus’s public ministry – would leave readers “with the impression that Jesus’s reputation for working miracles played no little part in his ability to attract both the favour of the crowds and the not-so-favourable attention of the authorities, Jewish as well as Roman”. Essentially, a contemporary account of Jesus found the miraculous to be endemic to his identity.
Meier followed that observation with one of his trademark sentences: “I stress the word reputation, since it is not my intention here or elsewhere in this book to make the theological claim that Jesus actually worked miracles.”
John Meier was, first and foremost, a Catholic priest. There can be no doubt what Meier the lifelong Catholic thought of Jesus’s miracles. Yet Meier the historian – and teacher of future theologians and historians – could only proceed in a scholarly manner. For those in the academy, such an observation is not revelation, but it is worth noting if only to assert the Church’s rigorous scholarship, a fact either unknown or ignored by much of the secular world.
As the Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan said, he came to the Church “on his knees” – but his belief and devotion were anchored in rigorous study of the Bible and the Church Fathers. Catholicism is a faith of the heart and the mind. The Catholic Church is both folk and formal; emotional and erudite. Neither is better; both are necessary.
Meier’s particular interest in Jesus’s miracles is the synthesis of these dualities. He noted that prophets were aplenty in Palestine in the time of Jesus, but “none of them had the combination of such success, such a disastrous fate, and such a lasting impact as the Nazarene”.
Meier’s life was devoted to that man from Nazareth. He was ordained at 25 years old in 1967, at the Altar of the Chair in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He taught for 12 years at St Joseph’s Seminary in New York, and for 14 years at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. After being named a monsignor by Pope John Paul II, Meier began teaching at the University of Notre Dame, where he remained for 20 years.
His work was charged with wit. Aware of the length needed for each volume, he warned readers that “the road lies long and dusty”. As he was concerned with an historical rather than theological investigation into Jesus, he quipped that readers should imagine that “a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew and an agnostic – all honest historians cognisant of 1st-century religious movements – are locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they have hammered out a consensus document on Jesus of Nazareth”.
One of Meier’s gifts was his ability to empathise with those disparate identities; his scholarship was sufficiently rigorous and complex to transcend Catholic concerns, yet simultaneously inextricable from a Catholic worldview.
Meier was fond of pointing towards the “criterion of embarrassment” as an essential criterion for examining the historical Jesus. He argued that Gospel material that was embarrassing or unusual “would hardly have been invented by the early Church, since such material created embarrassment or theological difficulties for the Church”.
The elements of Jesus’s life that transcend conventional reason reveal, for Meier, the limitations of those conventions. Although Meier was a cautious scholar who would “reject credulity”, he argued that historians must also “reject an a priori affirmation that miracles do not or can not happen.” With a touch of warranted sarcasm, Meier rejected the claims of scholars that “modern man cannot believe in miracles” by citing consistent surveys that eight out of 10 Americans continue to believe in miracles.
At the time of his death, Fr Meier was working on the sixth volume of A Marginal Jew; it was focused on “the titles used by and of the historical Jesus”. I hope some intrepid scholar or editor might investigate that work-in-progress, and report some of his insightful findings.
In Meier’s work and life, we can find an inspiring model. An historical study of Jesus and the Bible is not staid, but can be generative of one’s own belief. Although we may come to the Church on our knees, we might do service to Jesus through our mind and intellect.
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