Editorial

John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid and Donald Senior (eds), The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century: Third Fully Revised Edition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2022); 2196 pp.: 9781474248853, £75 (hbk)

This scholarly, single-volume, biblical commentary will be a valuable asset for any preacher trying to avoid numerous fundamentalist online commentaries. Earlier generations of preachers were brought up with Peake’s Commentary on the Bible as a reliable brief guide. But that is now 60 years old (the 2001 edition was simply a reprint) and biblical scholarship has moved on considerably since then. Eerdmans’ Commentary on the Bible (2003) and Oxford University Press’s The Oxford Bible Commentary (2007) are both now valued, with Professors John Rogerson and James Dunn editing the first and John Barton and John Muddiman the second, commissioning a galaxy of excellent scholars – and they are both good value as paperbacks and ebooks.

However, The Jerome Biblical Commentary, first published in 1968, just two years after Vatican II ended, has long been valued for its role within ecumenism. The first edition was led by the late, great Raymond Brown (1928–98), long admired also for his commentary on John. It signalled a clear move by Roman Catholic scholars into mainstream, critical, biblical scholarship. I met this courteous and ecumenical scholar when he was invited to take a seminar in the early 1990s by my late colleague Dr John Court at the University of Kent. The first edition (and the 1990 revised edition), largely written by priests and the religious, successfully ‘demonstrated the value of critical biblical scholarship for the life of the [Roman Catholic] Church and reflected the hard-earned efforts of a generation of scholars and church leaders’ – as the 2022 editors rightly claim (p. x).

The 2022 edition is not a revision but a complete rewrite. Half of the contributors are now lay Catholics and 35 of them are women (with two of the four new editors being women as well). It is bolder, too, reflecting ‘the stronger awareness of diversity across the global [Catholic] Church itself’ (p. xi). Many of the contributors remain North American, but not exclusively so. In addition, its specifically Catholic claims are noticeably restrained: there is no mention of the papacy when exegeting Matthew 16.18, scepticism is expressed about the Petrine authorship of both 1 and 2 Peter, and the exegesis of the so-called ‘woman taken in adultery’ pericope opens with the frank admission that it ‘is not part of the original Gospel’ before adding (almost apologetically) that it is still ‘considered revealed Scripture by the Catholic Church’ (p. 1411). More in line with Catholic tradition, however, it includes books from the Apocrypha simply as part of the Old Testament canon.

I well remember the outcry when the radical Catholic theologian James Mackey was appointed to succeed the formidable Presbyterian Tom Torrance at Edinburgh University in 1979. There were widespread protests within the Church of Scotland (which, ironically, in those days still had a majority of its members on the appointment committee). Over 40 years later, academic theology has changed radically. With the highly respected Presbyterian David Fergusson now holding the Regius Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, it is difficult to imagine such a protest today within either the Church of Scotland or the Church of England. This new edition of The Jerome Biblical Commentary very properly recognizes this important ecumenical change. Theology has moved on.