After all the tangents and side-tracks, I can return now to my reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger.   Perhaps I should say a few things about his personality, as I perceived and experienced it.

I think everyone who knew him would say that he was a true Christian gentleman.  He was respectful of all people, polite to a fault, and cordial.   But he was not someone that anyone became intimate with.  I am absolutely positive that I came to be closer to him than any PhD student he supervised in his 40 plus years teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary.  He as much as told me so.  I knew his wife and his two sons (a bit); he invited my family to Christmas dinner; for several weeks I lived with him and his wife in their home.   But there was always a kind of distance to him as well.  He never let down his hair.   The best I can put it is that he was cordial rather than warm and intimate.

He was a shy man….

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