Thomas Brodie (1940-2026) — A Scholar Worth Remembering

Posted by Michael Commane February this year:

Thomas Brodie deserves to be well and long remembered, not only for his scholarship but also for his personal experiences as a scholar of integrity in a field where faith hangs like a fog over all its practitioners—believers, agnostics, and even the few atheists alike.

Of particular interest to readers here is Michael Commane’s note:

[Thomas Brodie] was the first director of the Dominican Biblical Institute in Limerick, which opened in 2001. Tom remained as director until 2012. The institute closed in 2016.

The Irish Catholic of January 21, 2013 wrote the following about Tom: “This[Tom’s retirement as director] coincided with his publication of Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus, in which he claimed Jesus Christ did not exist as an historical person and led the Irish Dominican province to direct him to withdraw from ministry and cease teaching and writing.”

Tom did not accept the findings of the Dominicans. He argued that he was entering into the ongoing debate about the historical person of Christ.

I covered in depth that publication, Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus. See

The Brodie Files: Beyond the Quest Posts on Vridar

Brodie was never “anti-Christian”. He even argued that a non-historical Jesus made the Christian message potentially more personally meaningful. Compare Mythicism Making Christianity More Meaningful. Beyond the Quest is a phenomenological journey that allows readers to understand why and how he came to see Jesus as a spiritual metaphor with the power to edify the believer — but this could only be accomplished by acknowledging the New Testament’s Jesus was never a historical figure. (Another work I am reminded of, though this one was authored by an atheist: Jesus Came Again; a parable.)

But Brodie’s most in-depth scholarly output was probably his 33 + 653 page tome, in effect a collation of many years of his research and publications: The Birthing of the New Testament: The Intertextual Development of the New Testament Writings.

If you have been intrigued by works (not only by Brodie, but also Winn, MacDonald, Charbonnel and others) identifying the Greco-Roman as well as Old Testament sources of the gospel narratives, you will appreciate The Birthing as a priceless treasure indeed. The same volume contains an overwhelming (in my view) demolition of the need to assume oral traditions lie behind the gospels. Brodie even argues that the “raw emotion” of Paul’s epistle to the Galatians is a literary artifice drawn from the Old Testament.

Vridar posts addressing Thomas Brodie’s work (including this post) are collated here. There are about 50 or so of them.

Remembering Thomas Brodie with fondness and sadness and deep respect, I like to leave my little collection of hard copies of his works:

& jointly edited with Thomas Brodie:

Brodie, Thomas L., Dennis R. MacDonald, and Stanley E. Porter, eds. 2006. The Intertextuality of the Epistles: Explorations of Theory and Practice. Sheffield Phoenix Press.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.