Raymond Brown on eating peas with a knife

"I can recall speaking before a group of scholars on John and someone asking me if I thought that my approach meant that the Bultmannian consensus on John might now be breaking up. My response was that I had never understood that there was a consensus since the English and most Roman Catholics had never accepted Bultmann's unprovable thesis that the roots of John were not in Judaism but in gnosticism. At that time I did not yet understand the way in which some Americans, influenced by German scholarship, created the appearance of unanimity by quoting each other and their masters; and the reaction to my remark by the audience was as if I had eaten peas off my knife."

- Raymond Brown, "A Personal Word" in Joel Marcus and Marion L. Soards (eds.), Apocalyptic and the New Testament: Essays in Honor of J. Louis Martyn (JSNTSup 24; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989), 9-12.