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 last week in South Bend, Indiana.
He was 80-years-old.
Meier was born in the Bronx, New York, on 8th August, 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 21st December, 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.
Read the obituary to John P Meier in Sight Magazine.