A defense of Scott Hahn and the Hahn School

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 11, 2026

Readers of this column know that I occasionally opine on matters of Biblical scholarship about which I have no expertise. Buckle up because I am about to do it again. In fact, it is because I have no expertise that I want to say something about this. Something on behalf of us little people, the non-experts.

Last month I attended a Bible conference in Connecticut put on by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. The talks were given by Scott Hahn, who founded the Center, along with two of the Center’s affiliated scholars, John Bergsma and Jeff Morrow. There were over 800 Catholic laypeople in attendance, so many that the local organizers had to move the event to a larger venue. I wrote about it here.

Shortly after my column was published, I became aware of an article that appeared a few days prior, “Paul Is Not the Synthesis: How the Steubenville Canon empties the tabernacle and demotes Deuteronomy.” It is a polemic by Charles Hughes Huff, a scholar of ancient languages, against what he calls “the Hahn School.” Huff’s piece is about 4,000 words long. ChatGPT summarizes it thusly:

The author argues against a popular Catholic biblical interpretation (especially that promoted by Scott Hahn and the St. Paul Center) that makes Paul’s theology the central synthesis organizing all of Scripture. He claims this approach oversimplifies and misreads the Bible, diminishes the Old Testament (particularly Deuteronomy and the priesthood), and should not be treated as the definitive theological framework for understanding Scripture.

The Historical-Critical Empire Strikes Back

I’m sure there is space for a healthy debate between Huff’s position and “the Hahn School.” But reading his piece a few weeks ago, it seemed like there was more to it than that. Despite Huff’s claim that he would not go after the Hahn School “simply because it rejects historical-critical theories,” those theories, or the uses to which the Hahn School puts them, do seem to be the central issue.

The historical-critical theory is a method by which scholars attempt to understand what the human authors of the Bible intended to convey in its literal meaning, prior to, or apart from, any theological interpretation. The Hahn School does not reject the historical-critical method. It qualifies it, it contextualizes it. It warns that the historical-critical method is not the end-all-be-all of Biblical exegesis. We went through a long dry spell when it was the end-all-be-all. The Hahn School was a long overdue correction.

If Huff thinks the Hahn School was an overcorrection, fine, have a debate. But he seems unhappy that the Hahn School’s critique of the historical-critical method is ascendant and that the historical-critical method (or again, its exclusivity or its holding pride of place) has fallen out of favor. His piece feels like “the Historical-Critical Empire Strikes Back.”

Again, I have no scholarly background in these matters. But the adult who led our youth group at my local parish in the 1980s and my pastor in the 1990s, this was their main approach to Scripture. I recognize it when Huff objects to the Hahn School “harmonizing the Gospel accounts” and it still seems to me to lack something. Yes, there are four gospels, and yes, the historical-critical method is to take each of them on their own merits. But there was only one Jesus, right? These aren’t stories from four parallel earths, a la science fiction. If Huff wants to debate the Hahn School on whether the Last Supper was a Seder in the way Hahn says it was, or the meaning of the Old Testament covenants, fine, have that debate. But why is harmonizing the Scriptures, the gospels, automatically bad?

Wellhausen—just Wellhausen!

Huff criticizes what he sees the Hahn School as saying, that “the properly prophetic, the promise culminating in Messiah, is the real and ideal Israelite religion, while the law represents a falling away from that ideal...” So was Jesus demoting Deuteronomy too, when he said Moses allowed divorce “because of your hardness of your heart?” There is no end of the ways of describing this issue, no end to the debates as to the proper relation of Judaism to Christianity, whether the stages of Old Testament Judaism or modern rabbinic Judaism. But whatever the proper way of putting it, Christianity does bring something good that is missing in Judaism, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? What would Huff say is the point? And isn’t that the problem with the historical-critical guys after all? They often seem like they don’t really believe in Christianity.

Huff complains that the Hahn School’s critique of the historical-critical method focuses on “Wellhausen—just Wellhausen!,” a German Biblical scholar who died over a hundred years ago. I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. When Pope Benedict published his Jesus trilogy, his criticisms of historical-critical Bible scholars were attacked as being not up to date, not knowing the most recent names in the field, not knowing all the most recent twists and turns. Same thing here against the Hahn School. This is what the experts often do.

In 2004 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, published a document criticizing radical feminist theology. It was met at the time with giggling from the sort of people Ratzinger was criticizing: Rosemary Radforth Reuther, Mary Hunt, etc, because, they said, he wasn’t up on the latest names and trends in the field. To say so was to give themselves more authority than they possessed. Ratzinger didn’t need to be up to date on the latest because it was the fruit of a poisoned tree. His point was that the whole school was erroneous in its origins. It likely only got sillier from there. Why would Ratzinger need to engage the further permutations?

As with Ratzinger and radical feminism, so with the Hahn School and Welhausen. Modern historical-critical enthusiasts can say they are not about Welhausen. But they are still thinking in Welhausen’s categories, which just goes to illustrate the critique the Hahn School is making of them.

Not Traditional. Revolutionary.

Huff pits the historical-critical giant of an earlier era, Raymond Brown, against the Hahn School’s “Pauline synthesis.” Again, the Pauline synthesis strikes me as just basic Christianity. Here is what Raymond Brown wrote about St. Paul in his “An Introduction to the New Testament”:

Next to Jesus, Paul has been the most influential figure in the history of Christianity. Although all of the New Testament writers are working out the implications of Jesus for particular communities of believers, Paul in his numerous letters does this on the widest scale of all. That range, plus the depth of his thought and the passion of his involvement, have meant that since his letters became part of the New Testament, no Christian has been unaffected by what he has written. Whether or not they know Paul’s words well, through what they have been taught about doctrine and piety, all Christians have become Paul’s children in the faith.

In an addendum attached to the top of his piece a few days after it was posted, Huff seems to say that what he finds objectionable about the Hahn School is not that they reject the historical-critical method but—worse!—that the Hahn School uses the historical-critical method to prove the text’s spiritual meaning. In other words, that the Hahn School is confusing the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture, whereas premodern interpreters (“Gregory of Nyssa, Hugh of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas”) knew to stay in their lane. There’s that darn harmonizing again!

I agree that the Hahn School’s combining of its high view of inspiration and inerrancy with the historical-critical method is not traditional. But how could premodern Scripture commentators have made a choice for, or against, harmonizing their allegorical reading of Scripture with the historical-critical method when the historical-critical method had not yet been invented? The Hahn School is not so much traditional as it is revolutionary—in a good way. They are breaking new ground.

Bigger than Hahn

It’s not just Huff. Others have criticized the Hahn School for “rejecting” the historical-critical method, but ironically, a search of the Hahn School’s works reveal dozens of historical-critical articles and published in top scholarly journals like The Journal of Biblical Literature or The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, and by publishers like Oxford and Yale University Presses. Again, it seems the problem is not that the Hahn School does not use the historical-critical methods. It’s that they use them to argue for conclusions that upset the establishment.

Here’s the thing. Every Catholic should know Scripture. But most of us are never going to attend graduate school to do it. And that’s a relief. The need some scholars have, to wall off the historical-critical method as this precious thing that can’t ever be infected by actual Christian belief, seems to imply that the whole thing is not real. That we little people can believe our silly myths while the scholars chuckle over our ignorance about what the Bible’s authors really meant.

The Hahn School is bigger than Hahn, bigger than Hahn-Bergsma-Morrow, bigger than Steubenville. I see overlapping emphases between it and the Augustine Institute, it and Ascension Press, it and Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire, it and any number of books from Ignatius Press and other publishers. If you read books from these various entities and you know who is affiliated with which one, you know how much they collaborate. And you know that they are not uniform among one another, that they have their disagreements.

What they all have in common is that they don’t think people like you and me are naive and need to be shaken out of it. With all due respect to the great Raymond Brown, I have never met an ordinary believer whose life was changed by his work. But the Hahn School, like Newman and Chesterton before them, are effective educators who have the media and the personal presence to bring about the conversion of thousands.