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”.
