John L. McKenzie

John Lawrence McKenzie (October 9, 1910 – March 2, 1991) was born on October 9, 1910, in Brazil, Indiana, the first of the six children of Myra (Daly) and Harry McKenzie. John McKenzie became the premier Catholic Biblical scholar of the mid-twentieth century; indeed, John Courtney Murray, SJ, wrote that John McKenzie was “the best Catholic theologian he knew of in the United States.”

John McKenzie was interested in the Jesuits from an early age. At some significant sacrifice to his family, he was enrolled in a Jesuit boarding high school in St. Mary’s, Kansas, where he came first in his class three out of his four years there. After graduating in 1928, he entered the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus and was ordained a priest in 1939. He was supposed to study theology in Rome, but the onset of World War II made that impossible. Consequently, he and others were required to study instead at the Weston School of Theology in Massachusetts (now the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry). He received his Doctorate in Sacred Theology from Weston.

John McKenzie taught for nineteen years at the Jesuit Theologate in West Baden, Indiana, before transferring to Loyola University Chicago. He left Loyola to become the first Catholic Faculty member at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Following this, he taught at the University of Notre Dame, at Seton Hall University, and at DePaul University.

He was self-taught in ten languages. His scholarly and popular writings were voluminous. He was much sought after as a lecturer as well. In the English-speaking world, his 900,000-word Dictionary of the Bible remains the most frequently used single-volume biblical dictionary available. At the time of its publication in 1956, a review in the periodical, The Thomist, called his book, The Two-Edged Sword, “the most significant Catholic interpretation of the Old Testament ever written in English.” It remains in print to this day and continues to be considered, by scholars and non-scholars alike, a masterful reflection on the Old Testament. The New York Times obituary announcing his death said, “Rev. John L. McKenzie was a pioneering and outspoken Roman Catholic biblical scholar, (who) through scholarly and popular writings, helped bring about the general acceptance by Catholic scholars and Church authorities of the scientific techniques of investigating Scripture, which had been highly suspect in Catholic circles when he began his career.” In 1965 and 1966 alone, besides the above-noted Dictionary of the Bible, he published The Power and the Wisdom, an interpretation of the New Testament; Authority in the Church, a book arguing that service—diakonia—rather than secular models of government—domination—should define the Church's understanding and use of authority; a seminal essay on natural law in the New Testament, as well as eleven other articles and nineteen book reviews of scholarly works. He is the author of a number of articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica (14th edition): Adam and Eve, Hexateuch, Israel, Mizpah, Pentateuch, Zephania, and Zion.

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