Luke Timothy Johnson’s scholarly life

Besides being a wide-ranging and prolific New Testament scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson is a pastorally minded teacher and writer. In numerous sermons and church forums and in books such as Faith’s Freedom and The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters, he has taken up fundamental issues of faith and religious practice in response to the pressing needs of students and the wider church. In the 1990s he wrote in this magazine (among other places) a crucial critique of the much-publicized Jesus Seminar, whose participants claimed to have located the historical Jesus lying behind the Gospels and outside the confessions of the church (“The Jesus Seminar’s misguided quest for the historical Jesus,” January 1, 1996). Operating from within the guild of historical-critical scholars, he effectively rebutted the seminar’s overblown claims.

In this memoir, Johnson offers an engaging account of his rich and varied professional career. Along the way he offers an equally engaging glimpse of the spiritual journey that helped shape it.

Johnson describes growing up in small-town Wisconsin as the youngest child in a large, devout Catholic family. The death of his mother when he was 11 (his father died when Johnson was just two months old) led to a painful relocation with relatives in Mississippi and then, with the guidance of priests and nuns, entry at age 13 into a “minor” or junior seminary, an institution now all but extinct in US Catholicism.