ProFile–JEANNINE BROWN
by Elizabeth Brown ’16
Jeannine Brown’s Bethel connection is about much more than a career. A scholar, author, and Bethel Seminary professor of New Testament, Brown S’91 began her relationship with Bethel in 1987, when she pursued her Master of Divinity degree at Bethel Seminary St. Paul. While teaching a summer Greek course at the seminary in 1989, she met Tim Brown, who claims he was the most attentive student in the course. They were married in the seminary chapel a year later. Now, 20 years after co-teaching her first seminary class as a faculty member, Brown is the first Bethel Seminary professor to hold a transregional position at both the San Diego and St. Paul campuses. Her teaching load is divided between the two locations, with primarily online or intensive courses in St. Paul and more face-to-face classes in San Diego. When asked about the advantages of her job, Brown doesn’t hesitate. “I get to live in San Diego!” she says. Brown hasn’t stopped with just two teaching jobs. In 2010, she accepted a position on the New International Version Committee on Bible Translation, which has led her to translation work in far-flung destinations worldwide. She also finds time for academic writing on subjects from Matthew and the Gospels to hermeneutics and interdisciplinary topics. Brown often fields questions about her influence and experience as a woman in the male-dominated arena of biblical studies. “My gender alone doesn’t interact with reading Matthew,” she explains. “My whole person does.” It is this awareness of her identity as a whole person that has led to the collaboration that has characterized her career. “I like being a bridge-builder,” she says. Brown’s long career at Bethel, and her many contributions to biblical scholarship, have been shaped by who she is—not just as a woman, but as a scholar, writer, wife, mother, and foundationally, a Christ-follower.
Bethel University
Photo by Nathan Klok ’17
And Brown’s Bethel connection continues. Her daughter Elizabeth (Libby) Brown ’16 is a current student at Bethel’s College of Arts & Sciences, where she double majors in literature and communication arts and literature education, works as a nonfiction editor on the university’s literary magazine, and occasionally writes about her mom for Bethel publications.
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