I have been posting some reminiscences of my relationship with my mentor, Bruce Metzger, one of the great New Testament textual scholars of the twentieth century.  Here I talk about one of my direct involvements with him as his student. Metzger directed my PhD exams, and was responsible for writing the questions for one of them.  To explain that situation requires a good bit of background. In a typical PhD program, at the end of two years of taking seminars (usually three a semester, for four semesters), a student takes the PhD exams.  These go by different names: “Comprehensive exams” (that’s what we called them at Princeton Seminary); “Preliminary Exams” (i.e. preliminary to writing a dissertation); “Qualifying exams” (i.e. that qualify you to move on to the dissertation stage) – all of these refer to the same battery of exams.  In most respects the way it was set up at Princeton was fairly typical – it is the way we also have it set up in the PhD program that I teach in at UNC.  [...]

In my last post I started to resume my recollections of my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger.   In this post I recall when he first showed me I was a lousy writer. In graduate school different professors have different approaches to evaluating and grading term papers. Some professors are completely anal about it and insist on correcting every mistake, rewriting every sentence, and reformulating every idea.  Not many are that way, thankfully, since doing all this takes an enormous chunk of time (and a very large ego).  I never had a professor like that, but I have known some over the years.  Others make extremely judicious and helpful comments, sometimes at great length.  My teacher Paul Meyer was like that at Princeton Seminary.  The comments he made on our papers were in depth, always on target, and superior in quality to any of the scholarship we read all semester in the class.  Meyer never published much himself – he threw himself into his students instead; we used to threaten to extract his comments [...]

Many years ago on the blog I was asked about my relationship with my mentor Bruce Metzger, an internationally famous scholar of the New Testament who is generally acknowledged as the greatest expert on biblical manuscripts in America, ever.  He was also a devout Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister.  I, obviously, am not.  (Though I was very much a committed Christian when I first met him.)  Here is the question and my initial response.   QUESTION: Hey Bart, I know you studied under Bruce Metzger and my question is how did he feel about your skepticism toward the trustworthiness of the N.T?   RESPONSE: Bruce Metzger and I had a long and very close relationship.  I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years.  He directed my masters and PhD theses; he helped me break into publishing; he worked to get me into editorial positions for journals and monograph series; he guided my research [...]

I've started a short thread on the issue of how the problem of suffering affected my Christian faith.  To explain the matter further, here I quote from a section of my book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question:  Why We Suffer.   The book is mainly about the variety of answers you can find in the Bible about why God allows or even causes suffering.  But I begin the book by talking about why it has long been such an important issue to me personally. ****************************** Eventually I felt compelled to leave Christianity.  I did not go easily.  On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known from childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenage years onward.  But I came to a point where I could no longer believe.  It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no long reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life.  In [...]

When the new blog site launched a week ago I decided to start off with five of my favorite posts from each of the first five years of the blog.  And then someone asked me: why just the first five?  Why not the more recent four?  And I replied:  I don’t know – I didn’t think about it!   But now I have and have decided: why not? So here is number six of five favorite posts, this one from 2017.  It’s more of a personal topic, but it’s one that I know a lot of you can resonate with: the struggle involved in moving from being a person of faith to becoming an agnostic. ****************************** I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my Ph.D. program.  I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving [...]

I've been concerned for the past months (among many other things, of course) about PhD's trying to get teaching positions in colleges and universities. Even when there is not an economy-busting pandemic, it's hard. Very hard. Many years ago when I was on the market, I had an awful time trying to find a job . Oddly enough, I see now, I posted on this very topic, on this very date during the first year of the blog (2012). Here's what I said then. *********************************************************************** My students are alternatively comforted and chagrined to learn how hard it was for me to get a teaching position. It makes them feel good that they are not alone, but bad that they too might have a hard time – even harder. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs [...]