Author(s): Mato Zovkić / Language(s): Croatian
Issue: 1/2017
He had Jesuits as teachers at his high school in Philadelphia and joined the U. S. Jesuits of Maryland Province when he was 18. During his studies, his immediate superiors motivated him to learn Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew with a view to Bible Studies in the future. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on Aramaic writings found in Egypt, under the mentorship of the Protestant Bible Scholar and Archaeologist, William Albright, at John Hopkins University in 1956. After receiving his S. S. L. from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome he made a fulfilling career in teaching and research at different universities in the U. S. He studied the Qumran writings extensively and published numerous articles about them, especially the four Tobit fragments in Aramaic and one in Hebrew found at Q4. According to his Jesuit confrère and fellow New Testament scholar John R. Donahue, his bibliography comprised about 550 articles, reviews and books. Several of his books have been published three times, in revised and expanded forms. In 1968, together with Raymond E. Brown, S. S. and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., he organized a collaboration of English-speaking Catholic Bible scholars in writing The Jerome Biblical Commentary. In this edition, he wrote the texts of ten items. The second edition was entitled The New Jerome Biblical Commentary and published in 1990 by the same three editors but with two thirds of the contributors being new. It included seven female Catholic Bible scholars. In this edition, Fitzmyer wrote the text of seven items. From the 1968 edition, M. Zovkic translated items 41, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79 and 90 into Croatian, published in book form in 1980. From the 1990 edition, M. Z. translated items 40, 41, 43, 44, 61 and 78 into Croatian for publication as A Commentary on the Gospels and Acts, and Darko Tomašević with Marinko Antolović translated items 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73 and 74 from the same edition, published in Croatian in 2012 as A Scientific Introduction to the Bible. Within the ecumenical series, The Anchor Bible, New York, Fitzmyer published his commentaries on Luke’s Gospel in two volumes (1981 and 1985), Romans (1993), Acts (1998), Philemon (2001) and First Corinthians (2008). His research on the Qumran fragments of Tobit resulted in his commentary on this deuterocanonical Old Testament book in 2003. Fitzmyer was nominated in 1973 as a member of the Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical working group in the U. S., which produced the monographs Peter in the New Testament and Mary in the New Testament, in 1973 and 1978 respectively. He helped in formulating the joint Declaration on Justification by Faith in 1983. He was a member of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 1967 to 1971 and the Pontifical Biblical Commission from 1984 to 1995. During his active years in the Washington D. C. area he was a member of the Jesuit community at Georgetown University, where, in 1964, he founded the Georgetown Summer Institute on Sacred Scripture to offer adult Christians an opportunity for biblical education, and he guided the Institute for 20 years. In 2011 he moved to the Jesuit Residence in Philadelphia, where he saw the terminal years of his earthly journey as a mission to pray for the Church and the Society of Jesus. He died on 24 December 2016 aged 96 and was buried on 5 January 2017.
M. Z. has been reading the exegetical writings of J. A. F. for more than 30 years and met him several times at the Colloquium biblicum lovaniense, Leuven, Belgium. M. Z. found J. A. Fitzmyer to be a brilliant Bible scholar and a fruitful user of the form- critical method, who explored the Bible within the Church and explained it to his fellow Catholics.
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