With all due respect for this endeavor to find not only the humorous
anecdote about the giants of NT scholarship--which is by far the easier
wish to satisfy--, but in particular, for edifying details about the
personal lives and hopefully saintly qualities of those giants, I am
inclined to wonder whether we really should look for the NT scholars to be
extraordinarily saintly. My own life's experience has been that those one
might with love and admiration call saints--although they too are sinners
like ourselves, are pretty rare and are to be found in all walks of life,
perhaps even more commonly among the more humble walks of life. I don't see
any reason to expect NT scholars to be more saintly because of the subject
matter of their scholarship. I've known scholars who WERE saintly, but not,
I think, because they were scholars. I'd like to believe that sound
learning makes a committed Christian a better one--but I'm not altogether
convinced that it is true; it is certainly true that it is not the sound
learning that makes a person a committed Christian but rather, I think, the
profound experience and acceptance of a love that one feels a compulsion to
express and share. Nor do I mean, on the other hand, to argue that the
great scholar is particularly likely to be a great sinner, although I
suspect that St. Augustine is not the only NT scholar ever to have plumbed
the depths of human sin as well as scaled the heights of NT scholarship.
All of which is to say that I think it is what makes the giants of NT
scholarship HUMAN that also makes them appealing to us and eager to hear
more lore of them.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/