John L. McKenzie Reprint Series

Series Foreword

Mark Twain once ruminated,“It ain’t the parts of the Bible I can’t understand that bother me; it’s the parts I do.” John L. McKenzie, commenting on the same subject from another perspective, wrote, “The simple see at once that the way of Jesus is very hard to do, but easy to understand. It takes real cleverness and sophisticated intelligence to find ways to evade and distort the clear meaning of what Jesus said.”

But McKenzie, like Twain, was himself a person of exceedingly high intelligence, distinctively witty, with a double-edged sword’s incisiveness. As the first Catholic elected President of the Society of Biblical Literature, President of the Catholic Biblical Association, fluent in ten languages, sole author of a 900,000-word Bible dictionary, of over a dozen books and hundreds of essays, John McKenzie attained worldwide recognition as the dean of Catholic biblical scholars.

But again like Twain, McKenzie possessed a cultivated reservoir of abiding empathy—cognitive and emotional—for ordinary people and what they endure, millennia-in and millennia-out. He insisted: “I am a human being before I am a theologian.” Unlike many who become en- trenched in a hermetic, scholarly world of ever-multiplying abstractions, McKenzie never permitted his God-given faculty of empathy to atrophy. To the contrary, he refused to leave his fellow human beings out in the cold on the doorstep of some empathically-defective theological house of cards. This refusal made all the difference. It also often cost him the support, or engendered the hostility, of his ecclesiastical and academic associates and institutional superiors—as so often happens in scholarly, commercial and governmental endeavors, when unwanted truth that is the fruit of unauthorized empathy is factored into the equation.

John McKenzie produced works of biblically “prophetic scholar- ship” unlike anything created in the twentieth century by any scholar of his stature. They validate, with fastidious erudition, what the “simple see at once” as the truth of Jesus—e.g., “No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective; he rejected it totally”—but which pastors and professors entrenched in ecclesiastical nationalism and/or organizational survivalism have chronically ob- scured or disparaged.

In literate societies, power-elites know that to preemptively or re- medially justify the evil and cruelty they execute, their think-tanks must include theologians as part of their mercenary army of academics. These well-endowed, but empathically underdeveloped, theological hired guns then proselytize bishops, clergy, and Christians in general by gilding the illogical with coats of scholarly circumlocutions so thick that the op- posite of what Jesus said appears to be Gospel truth. The intent of this learned legerdemain is the manufacturing of a faux consensus fidei to justify, in Jesus’ sacred name, everything necessary to protect and aug- ment an odious—local, planetary and/or ecclesial—status quo.

John McKenzie is the antidote to such secular and ecclesial think- tank pseudo-evangelization. Truths Jesus taught—that the simple see at once and that Christian Churches and their leaders have long since aban- doned, but must again come to see if they are to honestly proclaim and live the Gospel—are given superior scholarly exposition via McKenzie. This is what moved Dorothy Day to write in her diary on April 14, 1968, “Up at 5:00 and reading The Power and the Wisdom. I thank God for sending me men with such insights as Fr. McKenzie.”

For those familiar with McKenzie this re-publication of his writ- ings offers an opportunity to encounter again a consistent scholarly- empathic frame of consciousness about Genesis through Revelation, whose major crux interpretum is the Servant of Yahweh (Isaiah 42). Ultimately embodied in the person of Jesus, the Servant is the revealer of Abba almighty—who is “on our side,” if our means each person and all humanity. For all Christians, John L. McKenzie’s prophetic scholarship offers a wellspring of Jesus-sourced truth about the life they have been

chosen to live, the world in which they live, and the Christ in whom they “live and move and have their being.”

(Rev.) Emmanuel Charles McCarthy September 2008 Brockton, Massachusetts