Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 11 of 11

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: Metzger’s Faith

THIS POST CONTINUES MY RECOLLECTIONS OF MY MENTOR BRUCE METZGER. Several times in these posts on Bruce Metzger I have mentioned the fact that many of his colleagues at Princeton Theological Seminar considered him “old school,” and theologically a bit, well, naïve. It is common in theological circles to brand someone who has an older view of things that is not cutting edge as naïve. And Metzger certainly was not cutting edge when it came to theology. Metzger had been raised in a pious home in Pennsylvania and the piety and simple beliefs of his youth stayed with him through old age. As I’ve indicated, he knew billions of facts about the Bible – its teachings, its historical context, the formation of the canon, the transmission of its text, the translation of its text into ancient languages (Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic -- and so on!), the history of its interpretation, etc. etc. But his own personal beliefs could well have been the same had he not known these billions of facts. His was [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:25:11-04:00July 19th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: Serving as his Teaching Assistant

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY RECOLLECTIONS OF MY TIME WITH BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR AT PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY FOR SEVEN YEARS (BOTH MY MASTERS AND PH.D. DEGREES) In addition to studying with Bruce Metzger for seven years, four of them as his PhD student, I also served as his teaching assistant on a number of occasions. Teaching assistants normally help with the teaching of a large lecture course. Sometimes that means meeting with groups of students regularly – once a week – for a discussions section dealing with aspects of the course. And always it means helping with the grading, or – even more commonly – doing all the grading! The professor then lectures, gives assignments, directs the course – and the T.A. (= teaching assistant) does all the grunt work. It’s part of the training. Metzger tended to have large courses for the MDiv students (Masters of Divinity is the basic degree for training to become a minister; MDiv students already have a college degree) – because so many of the students revered [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:42:38-04:00July 15th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: My Dissertation Proposal

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY REFLECTIONS ON MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR. SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE ASKED WHAT HIS VIEW WAS OF MY LEAVING THE FAITH. I'LL DEAL WITH THAT DOWN THE LINE. (AS IT TURNS OUT, IT'S VIRTUALLY A NON-EXISTENT PART OF THE STORY....) 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:47:58-04:00July 13th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical: Metzger and Me. The Seminar on the Canon

THIS RETURNS TO MY SERIES OF POSTS ON MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MENTOR BRUCE METZGER. EVENTUALLY, MANY POSTS FROM NOW, I'LL GET BACK TO THE ORIGINAL QUESTION: WHAT HE THOUGHT OF MY MOVE AWAY FROM THE FAITH. THAT'S WAY DOWN THE LINE. I return to the early years of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. That graduate seminar that I took with him, my first semester in my PhD program, was exhilarating, and in some senses life changing. To be sure, most of the work we did for the seminar was difficult and detailed. Every week we had to translate from Greek or Latin an ancient “canon list” – that is, a list of books that this or that author thought should be considered canonical scripture – lists and discussions of canon from Origen, Eusebius, Codex Claramontanus, Athanasius, and so on. One of the students in the course, as it turns out, was a Greek orthodox priest studying for a PhD. He obviously knew Greek extremely well, better than any of us (except, of course, Metzger). [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:45:18-04:00July 11th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: Beginning the PhD Program

HIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY POSTS ON MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR. When I entered the PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, my relationship with Bruce Metzger deepened significantly. At the time, the New Testament program at PTS was one of the best in the country. The faculty teaching the PhD students were all brilliant scholars; all of them except Metzger were principally known for their work in exegesis (the interpretation of the New Testament) and biblical theology (trying to explain the meaning and significance of the text for the individual Christian and the life of the church). None of them, apart from Metzger, was widely published and known outside of scholarly circles; but within scholarly circles they had a very high profile indeed. My main professors in the program were, in addition to Metzger, Chris Beker (a somewhat wild but truly genius interpreter of the writings of Paul), Paul Meyer (one of the deepest readers of texts I’ve ever known), and David Adams (a junior faculty person who had a brilliantly [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:33:54-04:00July 10th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical: Metzger and Me. My First Work on the Text

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 until I struck out on my own. I dare say I was closer to him than any student that he had in his four decades of teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He became a kind of father figure for me. He was a great New Testament scholar and a great man. I first heard of Bruce Metzger when I was in college studying Greek. My Greek professor at Wheaton, Gerald Hawthorne, knew that I was [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:41:51-04:00July 8th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Outta here (for a couple of days)

Friends, Fans, and Others, I am heading outta here for a few days, taking my 85-year-old mom trout fishing! We will be in a remote part of the Missouri Ozarks, where there is no Internet connection. I have prepared a couple of posts for when I'm away, which my trusty website and technology support, Steven Ray, will put up on the blog while I'm gone. But I will not be able to respond to comments, until I get back at the end of the week. Just so you know: I'm not meaning to ignore you!

BDEhrman2017-12-25T11:05:22-05:00June 25th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

The Work of the Professional Scholar 10: Editorial Work (Books)

In addition to serving as editors and editorial board members for academic journals, many scholars also serve in the same capacity for scholarly book series published by academic presses. Over the years – again, just taking myself as a not particularly unusual example – I have been on the editoral boards for a number of scholarly monographs series: Studies and Documents (published by Eerdmans Press); Early Christianity in Context (T & T Clark), and Vigiliae Christianae Supplements (E. J. Brill). Scholars serving in this capacity perform a similar service to those on editorial boards for journals, but now, rather than evaluating academic articles for publication, they are evaluating books, to be published in a series that is usually devoted to a certain kind of book written, broadly, on a certain kind of subject in the field. Serving as the referee for a book is obviously a good deal more demanding than for an article. Books are much longer, more thoroughly researched, and (far) more important for the academic career of the author. And so a [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-29T01:03:06-05:00June 4th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Am I an Agnostic or an Atheist?

QUESTION: If you don't think God exists, why do you refer to yourself as an agnostic? If this is your perspective, why not refer to yourself as an atheist? Could it be that you don't believe the Christian God exists, but are open to the possibility that some kind of higher power exists (this is my perspective) and this is why you call yourself agnostic? ANSWER: I have been getting this question a lot, and so I’ve decided to try to explain my position a bit more fully here in this post. The first thing to say is that I had no idea how militant both atheists and agnostics could be about their labels, until I became an agnostic myself! FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a member. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! ANSWER [continued]: As a believer, I pretty much thought they were two amicably related positions, one saying that there is no God and the other saying that s/he doesn’t know if there is a God. But [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:40:26-04:00June 2nd, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions|

The Life of a Professional Scholar 9: Editorial Work, Journals (2)

In addition to serving on an editorial board and participating, chiefly, in reading and evaluating journal submissions for publication, there is the task – a far more onerous, time consuming, and significant task – of editing a journal. I have never had the desire to be the chief editor of a major journal; like a lot of my colleagues, I see my contributions to the field coming in from other directions. But I have been an associate editor and have seen what editing a journal involves first hand. It involves a lot. The editor has numerous jobs and responsibilities. All submissions comes to the editor, who decides on which established scholar(s) should evaluate them for possible publication (the peer-review process). The editor normally has the final say, based on a careful reading of the article and of the readers’ reports. The editor is responsible for putting together each issue of the journal, deciding what can fit in and when each article should appear. (Normally, from the time an article is accepted for publication until it [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:40:44-04:00May 30th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Personal Reflections: At the Beach

I have decided to make some personal posts about the things I’m up to and doing, especially, but not exclusively, as they relate to Christianity in Antiquity. I’m seeing this as a kind of public diary/extended-twitter sort of thing. I’m not sure if it’ll be of any interest to anyone. If not, well, no one has to read it! I’ve spent the past ten days at the beach with two of my best friends. One of them happens to be my wife, Sarah; the other is Dale Martin, one of the country’s top New Testament scholars, senior professor at Yale, who years ago introduced Sarah and me when he (and Sarah) were both teaching at Duke. Sarah lived across the street from Dale in Durham, I lived in Chapel Hill. (This was 1996.) Dale thought we might be interested in each other, and introduced us, thinking it might lead to a wild weekend. He had no idea that it would turn out like this. For the rest of this post, please log in. If you [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:42:23-04:00May 26th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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