Brown remains controversial among traditionalist Catholics because of their claim that he denied the inerrancy of the whole of Scripture and their claim that he cast doubt on the historical accuracy of numerous articles of the Catholic faith. He was regarded as occupying the centre ground in the field of biblical studies, opposing the literalism found among many fundamentalist Christians while not carrying his conclusions as far as many other scholars.
Brown was appointed in 1972 to the Pontifical Biblical Commission and again in 1996. He was the Auburn Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York where he taught for 23 years. He served as president of the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature (1976-7) and the Society of New Testament Studies (1986-7). He was a Roman Catholic priest in the diocese of Baltimore, Maryland. Widely regarded as one of America's preeminent biblical scholars, Brown was awarded 24 honorary doctoral degrees by universities in the USA and Europe, many from Protestant institutions.
He died at St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California. Cardinal Mahony hailed him as "the most distinguished and renowned Catholic biblical scholar to emerge in this country ever" and his death, the cardinal said, was "a great loss to the Church.
Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, promulgated in 1965, stated that "the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. Brown saw this as an affirmation of his approach ("Many of us think that at Vatican II the Church 'turned the corner' on the inerrancy issue"), although he emphasised that to determine the real meaning of the words one needed to study the discussions in the Council that proceeded it. "Within its context, the statement is not without an ambiguity that stems from the compromise nature of Dei Verbum. The Council in 1962 rejected the ultra-conservative schema "On the Sources of Revelation" that originally had been submitted, and so it became a matter of face-saving that in the revisions and in the final form of the Constitution the ultraconservatives should have their say."
Dei Verbum cited two earlier papal promulgations (in addition to certain Patristic texts) Providentissimus Deus and Divino Afflante Spiritu. Providentissimus Deus stated, “it is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit that the sacred writer has erred”. Divino Afflante Spiritu, the document which established the parameters in which Catholic Biblical exegetes could legitimately apply the use of biblical criticism, quoted and reaffirmed the citation from Providentissimus Deus, adding that divine inspiration “not only is essentially incompatible with error but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and constant faith of the Church.”
Brown rejected the view that this implied the position had not changed: "Essential to a critical interpretation of church documents is the realization that the Roman Catholic Church does not change her official stance in a blunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time. ... What was really going on was an attempt gracefully to retain what was salvageable from the past and to move in a new direction at the same time".
The Second Vatican Council, one scholar observed, “raised biblical exegesis from the status of second-class citizenship to which it had been reduced among Catholics by an overreaction to the Protestant claim for its autonomy”.
In a detailed 1965 article in the journal Theological Studies examining whether Jesus was ever called "God" in the New Testament, Brown concluded that "Even the fourth Gospel never portrays Jesus as saying specifically that he is God" and "there is no reason to think that Jesus was called God in the earliest layers of New Testament tradition." He argued that, "Gradually, in the development of Christian thought God was understood to be a broader term. It was seen that God had revealed so much of Himself in Jesus that God had to be able to include both Father and Son."
Thirty years later, Brown revisited the issue in an introductory text for the general public, writing that in "three reasonably clear instances in the NT [Hebrews 1:8-9, John 1:1, 20:28] and in five instances that have probability, Jesus is called God", a usage Brown regarded as a natural development of early references to Jesus as "Lord".
Brown identifies three layers of text in John: 1) an initial version Brown considers based on personal experience of Jesus; 2) a structured literary creation by the evangelist which draws upon additional sources; and 3) the edited version that readers know today (Brown 1979).
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who has written presenting the infancy narratives and John’s Gospel as historically reliable, was personally complimentary of Brown and his scholarship, and has been quoted as saying he "would be very happy if we had many exegetes like Father Brown".
Other writers, on the other hand, have criticized Brown for excessive caution, for what they saw as his unwillingness to acknowledge the radical implications of the critical methods he was using. Frank Kermode, in his review of The Birth of the Messiah, accused Brown of being too eager to secure the imprimatur of the Catholic Church; Geza Vermes has described Brown as "the primary example of the position of having your cake and eating it'.
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