Being trained in a PhD program in a seminary or divinity school is very different from being trained in a secular research university.   I know this full well, because my PhD was from Princeton Theological Seminary, but my graduate teaching has all been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I sometimes find it amusing that some of my critics attack my credentials for interpreting the New Testament because – they say – I was principally trained to be a textual critic, that is, not as an exegete  (one who interprets texts), but as one who uses philological analyses in order to study Greek manuscripts so as to reconstruct the oldest form of a text.  Those are two very different disciplines.  And the objection to my extensive discussion of biblical interpretation is that I wasn’t trained to do that kind of thing.

That is so wrong.   In my PhD program at Princeton Seminary, I never once

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