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Jeff Morrow is Assistant Professor of Theology at Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He also serves as a Senior Fellow of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
Jeff earned his Ph.D. (2007) in Theology at the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio, in the program on the U.S. Catholic Experience, where he focused on historical theology and the history of biblical exegesis. He earned his M.A. (2003) in Theological Studies, with a focus on Biblical Studies, also at the University of Dayton. He earned his B.A. (2001) at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where he double majored in Comparative Religion and Classical Greek, and minored in Jewish Studies.
Jeff originally comes from a Jewish background; he attended Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah. In 1997 he became an evangelical Protestant and was heavily involved with para-church ministry as an undergraduate student. He entered the Catholic Church, Easter Vigil 1999.
Jeff is a popular speaker who speaks regularly at parishes and schools, as well as at larger events. He has made popular presentations at the Applied Biblical Studies and the Defending the Faith Conferences at Franciscan University of Steubenville, as well as with the Coming Home Network International. He has also published in popular periodicals including This Rock, The Catholic Answer and New Oxford Review.
Jeff's scholarly work is primarily in the history of biblical interpretation, but he has also presented academic papers, and published scholarly articles, on a variety of topics related to theology, religion and the Bible. He has published scholarly works in academic journals including New Blackfriars, Pro Ecclesia and the Evangelical Review of Theology. He has also made scholarly presentations before a number of learned societies, including the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature and the College Theology Society.
He currently resides with his wife Maria (a doctoral candidate in Theology, specializing in Moral Theology) their three children Maia, Eva, and Patrick, in New Jersey.
Author Archives: Jeffrey L. Morrow
Curtis Mitch on the Authorship of the 4 Gospels
Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament
I’m currently teaching a New Testament course and I have been re-reading a lot of great material dealing with all aspects of New Testament studies. I’m re-reading—among other things—Curtis Mitch’s work. I thought this was especially well-written, and a good synthesis of modern scholarship. The excerpt below comes from the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The New Testament, which Curtis Mitch co-edited with Scott Hahn. With regard to the traditional attributions of authorship of the four Gospels—i.e., that Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, Luke wrote Luke, and John wrote John—Mitch writes the following:
Dr. Peter Williams on the Historical Accuracy of the 4 Gospels
Dr. Peter Williams of Tyndale House
This video is of Dr. Peter Williams of Tyndale House. He does a fantastic job in this 54 minute lecture, arguing for the historical reliability of the 4 canonical New Testament Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). He relies on old and more recent arguments (from scholars like Richard Bauckham and others). Williams is a cutting edge Protestant New Testament scholar who has done top notch scholarly work on the historical and linguistic background of the New Testament, and as well as work in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic).
Thanks to Michael Bird for posting this on his blog.
I would recommend reading Richard Bauckham’s book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, on this topic.
Jeff Morrow radio Interview: Conversion and the Bible Politicized
Just over a week ago, Dr. Michael Barber interviewed me on The Sacred Page radio show for a Catholic radio station. The interview pertained to my conversion to Catholicism and also to my research on the political roots of modern biblical criticism. Dr. Barber recently posted the podcast of the interview on the popular blog he co-authors, The Sacred Page. The podcast can be found here: http://www.thesacredpage.com/2011/09/tsp-episode-3-jeff-morrow-conversion.html
Confession and Spiritual Warfare
Confession is such an important Sacrament. We may associate the Sacrament of Confession especially with the season of Lent, or perhaps with Advent, but it is appropriate for Easter as well, since Easter celebrates the Lord’s resurrection, and many a soul are raised to new life through Confession. Moreover, Confession—which is sometimes called Reconciliation, or Penance—helps provide us with the grace and healing we need for the spiritual battles we engage in day in and day out. The battles I refer to are not the extraordinary ones we encounter in Hollywood films, so much as the daily battles we face to become more loving, to continually turn away from sin and turn toward God, continually to begin again and again—they are our daily battles to sow the seeds of the love and the peace of Christ in the world around us. In these daily battles, we get wounded, and Confession is the great Sacrament of healing that we need. St. Aphrahat was an eastern church father writing in the 300s A.D. Mike Aquilina includes a fantastic quotation from St. Aphrahat dealing with Confession/Penance, in a chapter devoted to the development of the Sacrament of Confession, in Aquilina’s wonderful book, Roots of the Faith. Here’s the quotation, taken from St. Aphrahat’s work, On Penitents:
Confession before Easter: Archbishop Dolan’s Letter
Rembrandt's "The Return of the Prodigal Son"
As has been mentioned before, Lent is a great time to make a good confession. Especially as we rapidly approach Easter, there’s no better time than now to think about receiving the grace of that special sacrament. I was recently made aware of Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s Lenten letter on confession which he sent on St. Patrick’s Day, and I thought I would post the link to it here, and encourage everyone to read it, since it’s such a beautiful and timely piece on this great sacrament.
Archbishop Dolan’s Letter can be found here.
If you haven’t read Scott Hahn’s, Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession you might want to pick that up and read it. Most importantly, go to that great sacrament of mercy. As Christians, we need to begin-again all the time, telling Jesus we’re sorry. The confessional is a privileged site for such mercy, and those who avail themselves of the sacrament frequently, know its rich benefits. Every act of contrition is a new beginning, and every confession is a welcome home.
Flinck's "The Return of the Prodigal Son"
Letter & Spirit Volume 6
Letter & Spirit volume 6 has finally been completed, and I would recommend pre-ordering it now to get your own copy when it comes hot off the press anyday now. This volume has been a long time in the making, and in some sense, can be said to be inspired by the 2008 Synod on the Word of God. That October synod was an amazing event, and I am sure it will bear much fruit to come. Pope Benedict XVI’s recent post-synodal apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini is one of the results of the synod. One area which the synod left uncompleted (as did Verbum Domini) was the issue of the nature and scope of biblical inspiration and the related issue of inerrancy. Pope Benedict XVI has asked the Pontifical Biblical Commission, an advisory body composed of biblical scholars, to study the issues of inspiration and inerrancy. Letter & Spirit 6 represents a significant contribution to the conversation about Catholic views concerning biblical inspiration, and interpretations of Dei Verbum no. 11.Here’s the journal’s contents for those of you who are interested:
Medieval Jewish Usage of the Greek Old Testament
Hebrew written over Akylas' Greek translation of the OT
Up until recently, common scholarly opinion was that Jews stopped using the Greek translation of the OT fairly early.1 Even when scholars conceded that Ethiopian Jews continue to use the Septuagint (LXX), the claim was that this is completely unique within the world of Judaism, without even remote parallels. Recently, scholars at Cambridge University working on the documents from the Cairo Genizah have discovered OT texts from the medieval period that are in Greek translation, but were transliterated into Hebrew. What that means is that these texts are in the Greek language—they are translations from earlier Hebrew copies—but then scribes wrote the Greek words using Hebrew letters.2 This is not the only example of such transliterations within Judaism, e.g. the Constantinople Pentateuch from 1547 includes side-by-side columns of the Pentateuch written in Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish, all in Hebrew script.3 The Cambridge find, however, is absolutely amazing! And it shows that the Greek OT was in use within the world of Judaism long into the medieval period (10th to 13th centuries!!!). Different Greek translations are present in these Genizah documents, but they include the LXX.4
And So, We Begin Our Lenten Pilgrimage
Lent is upon us. It is a time of renewal, a time of purification. I thought I would post just a few comments to help get us in the right frame of mind.
I love the season of Lent. It is the perfect time to get one’s life in order. It is the perfect season to reflect upon our relationship with God in an even deeper way than usual. We have many disciplines to help us, especially the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. To be clear, it is important that we pray at all times and in all seasons, not just in Lent. Likewise, it is good for us to fast and habitually practice small mortifications, small penances, small acts of loving reparation, throughout our lives even outside of Lent (and outside of Fridays throughout the year). And, it’s never a bad time to give alms; “now” is always the perfect time. But in Lent, the Church lays a special emphasis on these practices to help us through our desert journey. In Lent, we travel with Jesus (and with all of the saints who have gone before us) into the wilderness, toward the joy which Easter brings.
Were the Deuterocanonicals Ever a Part of the Jewish Canon of Scripture?
Isaiah in Greek
The biblical canonization process within Judaism is quite complicated. It is frequent for Protestant scholars to take Josephus’ use and list of Scriptures as representative of the basic canon of Pharisaic Judaism–which led to rabbinic, and eventually modern Judaism–arguing that the canonization process within Judaism predates the time of Jesus. Although the Council of Jamnia (or Yavneh) [end of the first century A.D.] is NOT likely the place where the Jewish biblical canon reaches its final form, that meeting did address the canonical status of certain books—Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs.1 Scholars remain divided about the closing of the Jewish biblical canon. In my opinion, it seems likely that it is even later that the canon becomes more fixed within Judaism.
What complicates matters further is that different groups within Second Temple Judaism apparently considered different books canonical. Although the biblical books used by the Pharisees is likely identical to Josephus’, which looks like the Old Testament of most Protestants, and, it should be noted, the Hebrew Bible (Tanak) of the majority of contemporary Judaism, this is not for certain. Sadducees, on the other hand, had a much smaller list of biblical books (only including the Penateuch, according to New Testament evidence). It is difficult to determine what canon was in
Why Did the Catholic Church Add Books to the Bible?
English Bible
I often get asked the question, “why did the Catholic Church add books to the Bible?” We hope to do more posts on the canonization process of Scripture, but for the moment, I thought I would respond to this question with a brief post.
This question often comes to me from Protestants who assume that Christians always had a Bible that matched a modern Protestant Bible: 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament. Since Catholic Bibles include 46 books in the Old Testament (but likewise share the same 27 book New Testament with Protestants), those asking me this question often assume that the Catholic Church added 7 books to the Old Testament at some point in the medieval period. These 7 books Catholics refer to as deuterocanonical (second canon), whereas Protestants often refer to them as apocryphal (hidden books, i.e., books that do not belong). These books are: 1 & 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch.