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 [...]