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9 FEBRUARY 1914 * 13 FEBRUARY 2007
FOUR DAYS after his ninety-third birthday, Dr. Bruce Metzger died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey. A member of the American Philosophical Society since 1986, Metzger was arguably the best textual critic and Bible translator ever to come out of North America.
Yet Metzger was born in the wrong century. He was a Renaissance man whose epistemological modus was ad fontes. A master of several tongues, he wrote hundreds of reviews of books published in eight languages, and produced treatises that wrestled with ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic. He lived by the mantra of a Chinese proverb, "The faintest ink is more lasting than the strongest memory," producing more than twenty thousand 3x5 cards of quotations and allusions (now housed at Princeton Theological Seminary), which he had gleaned from decades of research.
Metzger was born in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on 9 February 1914. He earned his B. A. in 1935 from Lebanon Valley College, where he got his initial exposure to ancient Greek and the science (and art) of textual criticism. From there, he went to Princeton Theological Seminary for his bachelor of theology degree (the equivalent of a master's degree today), which he earned in 1938. He received his Th.M. degree the following year. In the same year he was ordained in what is now the Presbyterian Church USA. He earned an M.A. in classics in 1940, followed by a Ph.D. in classics in 1942, both at Princeton University. Two years later he married Isobel Elizabeth Mackay, daughter of John Alexander Mackay, the third president of Princeton Theological Seminary.
In 1938, Metzger had joined the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a teaching fellow in New Testament Greek from 1939 to 1940, instructor in New Testament from 1940 to 1944, assistant professor from 1944 to 1948, associate professor from 1948 to 1954, and professor from 1954 to 1984. In 1964 he was named the George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, holding that position until his retirement in 1984. From 1984 till his death he was Collord Professor Emeritus. His teaching career at Princeton Theological Seminary lasted forty-six years. As a result of this long tenure, Metzger taught more...