Metzger dies at age 93
Bruce Metzger, biblical scholar and English Bible translator, has died of natural causes at age 93. Click here to read the AP News article, and click here for the NCC news release. Click here for Ben Witherington's tribute to Metzger in CT.
posted by Wayne Leman at 9:33 AM
4 Comments:
As they would say here, "Allah rəhmət eləsin", may God give him mercy and peace.
No, I'm not going to tell you all where "here" is. The word for "God" may give you a clue why.
The linked NCC article contains the quote, "His enthusiasm for the Bible as an ever-present guide for Christians [was] second only to his scholarship about the Bible". Although (much to my regret) I never met him personally, I suspect that the opposite was the case, and that it was his view of the importance of the Bible that "drove" his scholarship about it.
While he may be remembered most for his work on the NRSV, I think even its value was surpassed by his textual work, "crowned" as it was by his being an editor of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament (and of its companion volume "A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament"), which now forms the basis of most translations of the NT. I'm also sure that many, like me, have benefited from his informed overview of NT textual criticism in "The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration", even if they didn't all go on to enjoy "The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission and Limitations"!
For those who haven't already read it, I would warmly commend his "Reminiscences of an Octogenarian".
I am quite annoyed by Witherington's obituary. I hoped that for such an important piece of writing, Witherington would get his facts right (I have noted Witherington's works contain an unusually large number of errors). But Witherington praised Metzger's work on the RSV (in which he merely contributed to the Apocrypha) rather than on the NRSV or the Standard Bible Committee.
Metzger deserves a better tribute.
There are some interesting tributes to Metzger on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog, especially in comments on this post.
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