H. Benedict Green

I was sorry to hear this morning, via the BNTS list, of the death of H. Benedict Green. I got to know Father Benedict, who was based at The Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield, at the SNTS in Strasbourg in 1996, and thereafter every year at the British New Testament Conference, where he was a regular contributor in the Synoptics Seminar. We often talked and sometimes corresponded about the Synoptic Gospels, and he encouraged me a good deal in the writing of The Case Against Q. He was a long-time Q sceptic himself, and wrote a key article called "The Credibility of Luke's Transformation of Matthew" in C. M. Tuckett (ed.), Synoptic Studies: The Ampleforth Conferences of 1982 and 1983 (JSNTSup, 7; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1984), 131-56.

His two major books on the New Testament were The Gospel According to Matthew in the Revised Standard Version (The New Clarendon Bible; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), a much underrated small commentary on Matthew that is often, in my experience, worth consulting, and is ideal for student introduction, and Matthew: Poet of the Beatitudes (JSNT Sup. 203; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), a fine monograph making the detailed case for the beatitudes (and related texts) as a Matthean literary creation.