Jerome Murphy-O'Connor

Jerome Murphy-O'Connor (10 April 1935 – 11 November 2013) was an Irish Dominican priest, a leading authority on St. Paul, and a Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, a position that he held from 1967 until his death.

Biography He was born James Murphy-O'Connor in 1935 to Kerry and Mary (née McCrohan) Murphy-O'Connor, the eldest of four siblings. A cousin was Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the 10th Archbishop of Westminster.

Murphy-O'Connor attended the Christian Brothers College, Cork, and later the Vincentian Castleknock College in Dublin, where he decided to become a Dominican priest. He entered the Dominican novitiate in St. Mary's Dominican Church and Priory, Cork in September 1953, giving up his baptismal name to take a new name in religion, "Jerome". After the novitiate he studied philosophy for a year before studying at The Priory Institute in Tallaght and at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He was ordained as a priest in July 1960. In Fribourg his first serious study as a lecturer was on the theme of preaching in Saint Paul, which was later developed into a doctoral thesis.

Oxford University Press invited him to write an archaeological guide to the Holy Land which was first published in 1980. This was translated into several languages, with a fifth edition in 2008, and it has become the standard guide book. Murphy-O'Connor lectured around the world; he also made numerous television appearances,

He was also interviewed for the docudrama The Lost Tomb of Jesus, although he later stated that he was misquoted and misrepresented by the filmmakers, stressing that he did not believe there was any truth in the movie's claims, which he dismissed as "a commercial ploy".

Views

Murphy-O'Connor was considered a leading scholar on Paul the Apostle, on whom he authored several major works, both for scholarly and lay audience. In them, he tried to reconstruct the life and theology of the Apostles, mainly relying on his epistles, while avoiding the use of the Acts of the Apostles, unless necessary; he also consistently defended the authenticity of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Epistle to the Colossians and the Second Epistle to Timothy.

Selected works Murphy-O'Connor authored many research articles and reviews, often in Revue Biblique. In addition, he authored or co-authored the books listed below.