This is now my 40th year of teaching at a university, 36 of the years at UNC Chapel Hill and 4 before that at Rutgers as a 28 year old.  It very nearly didn’t happen at all.  Life is so strange.

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 were at secular institutions – state universities, private colleges, and the like. Most places simply don’t want to take a chance on someone who has been trained in a theological environment. Especially someone like me at the time. I had never set foot in a secular setting since high school! Starting when I was 17, I was at Moody Bible Institute (3 years), (Christian evangelical) Wheaton College (2 years), and then (Presbyterian ministerial training ground) Princeton Theological Seminary (7 years). Yikes!

Even theological schools and Christian colleges were not, by and large, interested in me, in no small measure because of my area of expertise. Greek manuscripts? Analyzing how fourth century church fathers quoted the Gospels in Greek in comparison with other ancient manuscripts??   Didymus the Blind??? Are you kidding? Most places wanted someone who was an expert on the letters of Paul, or the Gospel of John, or biblical hermeneutics, or – well, or anything besides what I was an expert in.

I tried my best to convince schools that I was not a typical textual critic and that I had broad range across the New Testament and related fields. I could teach Introductory courses in NT and OT, courses on Paul, on the Synoptics, on John, on … you name it.  And I published articles in other areas of NT studies to prove it. But it was a tough job market, and no one saw any reason to take a chance. There were tons of other candidates who actually looked like the sort of thing they were looking for. The cards were really stacked against me.

I don’t believe in miracles, but if I did, this would be one.  I was in the office of the director of graduate studies at Princeton Seminary – this was the office that served as the liaison with colleges, universities, and seminaries who were looking to hire beginning faculty members – and I was grousing about how I couldn’t get a lousy interview.  It was in the middle of the Spring semester, 1984.   I was in that office grousing several times a week, when I wasn’t buried in the library studying the Gospel citations of Didymus the Blind.  While I’m grousing, the phone rings.   The secretary picks it up.  She says “Wait a minute.”  And she hands me the phone.

It is the chair of the Department of Religion at Rutgers.   They have an emergency situation, here in the middle of a semester.  The woman who teaches New Testament has to take an emergency leave of absence.  Her husband has been diagnosed with cancer.  She has to withdraw from teaching immediately after she gives the mid-term exam.  They need someone to finish out the semester for her.  Would I be interested?

WOULD I BE INTERESTED?!?  Good God was I interested.

I did it.  I took over for her two classes (NT Introduction and the Writings of Paul).   And that’s how I got started.   She ended up retiring.  They gave me the position for another year, with three classes.  And the next year.  And the next year.  All this time I was seriously and desperately hunting for a permanent tenure-track job.  And getting nothing.  I was still a textual critic, after all, and no one wanted a textual critic.  But things turned around in a big way in my fourth year of teaching at Rutgers, three years after I finished my dissertation.  More on that in a future post.

For now, the Rutgers position.  It got me started in teaching.  If it hadn’t been for that job I may well have never gotten another.  I certainly would never have gotten one in a secular research university with the kind of educational background I had.   But my experience teaching at Rutgers set me up to get another job, the dream job I still have.  And it happened by a fluke.  Someone else’s horrible fortune (a dying husband) at the right time, and my happening to be in the right place just at that time, grousing about not getting a job in the director of graduate studies office.   Life is a funny thing….