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Fr R.E. Murphy, O.Carm. - An Appreciation
Catholic Biblical Scholar
Roland Edmund
Murphy, priest and biblical scholar: born Chicago 19 July 1917; professed a
monk in the Carmelite Order 1935; ordained priest 1942; died Washington DC
20 July 2002.
Roland Murphy was
one of the leading Catholic Old Testament scholars of the second half of the
20th century, a time when the Catholic community in the United
States produced a crop of well-educated, articulate biblical scholars.
As Catholic
biblical scholarship took off in the 1940s in the wake of the 1943 papal
encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu endorsing such study, Murphy was
keen to bring the fruits of his study to a wide audience. His special field
was the Old Testament wisdom literature, which includes the books of Job,
Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom and Sirach, and he was
among the translators for the New American Bible and the New Revised
Standard Version.
Murphy was an
early advocate of “inclusive language” in translation (ensuring that
gender-neutral terms are used) and had intended to call his 1960 book
Seven Books of Wisdom – before being dissuaded by the publisher –
“Wisdom, You are my Sister.”
Despite his
producing more than 230 books and articles, one of his major contributions
to biblical scholarship was his work as co-editor with Father Joseph
Fitzmyer and the late Father Raymond Brown of the monumental Jerome
Biblical Commentary, first published in 1968 and again in an extensively
revised edition as the New Jerome Biblical Commentary in 1990.
The work described
itself as a “compact commentary on the whole Bible written by Roman Catholic
scholars according to the principles of modern biblical criticism.” The 1968
edition had an introduction by Cardinal Augustin Bea, while the second had
the endorsement of Cardinal Carlo Martini of Milan, who praised it as an
“important tool for study and reflection.”
Murphy edited the
Old Testament commentary articles, and also contributed on Genesis, Hosea,
the Song of Songs, with introductions to the Pentateuch and Wisdom
literature and a thematic article on the history of Israel.
Born into a
Catholic family in Chicago, Murphy entered the Carmelite Order as a young
man and was admitted to profession in 1935. He was ordained priest in May
1942. He took degrees in theology and Semitic studies at the Catholic
University of America (CUA) in Washington DC in the 1940s, and from 1948 to
1970 taught Semitic languages and theology there. In 1950 he gained a
fellowship to study Arabic at the American Schools of Oriental Research in
Jerusalem, while in 1958 he studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in
Rome.
In 1971, in a move
unusual for the time, he took up a post in a non-Catholic institution,
becoming professor of biblical studies at Duke University Divinity School in
North Carolina. He also taught as visiting professor at Yale, Princeton and
Pittsburgh and was a resident scholar at Washington Theological Union.
Among the many
positions he held, Murphy was President of the Catholic Biblical Association
(which he had joined in 1948) and the Society of Biblical Literature of the
United States.
After his
retirement in 1987 from Duke University, he lived in Whitefriars Hall, a
Carmelite centre in Washington close to CUA and the National Catholic
Shrine. Despite the worsening in recent months of the emphysema he had been
suffering from for some time, he remained active reviewing theological books
in English, German and Italian.
In his last weeks
he was comforted with the prayer of the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin:
At the last moment
when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the
hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in these dark
moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only
that my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fibres of my
being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me
away within yourself.
Felix Corley
From “The
Independent” newspaper, London, 2002.
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