Gleason Leonard Archer

Gleason Leonard Archer (Junior) (born May 22, 1916 in Norwell , Massachusetts , † April 27, 2004 in Sterling , Kansas ) was an American lawyer, Old Testament scholar , evangelical professor of theology and author.

Life and education

Archer was 1916 in Norwell, Massachusetts, the third child of Elizabeth Snyder and Gleason Archer Senior born. He had an older brother, Allen, and an older sister, Marion. He became a Christian early on through the influence of his mother Elizabeth. She was a member of Park Street Church in Boston . His maternal grandfather was a pastor. Archer's father, Gleason Archer Sr., was the founder of Suffolk Law School in Boston. Gleason Junior grew up in Boston, but spent the summers in Norwell. He attended the Boston Latin School . In 1938 he received a bachelor's degree in classical studies from Harvard University with summa cum laude . In 1939 he received a Bachelor of Laws from Suffolk Law School in Boston and was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts. In 1940 he did his master's degree in classical antiquity at Harvard, and in 1944 the corresponding doctorate. Finally, in 1945, he received a bachelor's degree in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary , where he had studied Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic.

Academic activity

From 1945 to 1948 Archer served as an assistant pastor at Park Street Church in Boston, and he was also a teacher at the Boston Evening Bible School. His passion for the Old Testament was nurtured by Harold John Ockenga , the senior pastor of Park Street Church.

In 1948 Archer became Professor of Biblical Languages ​​at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena , California , where he remained until 1965. In 1963 he had a sabbatical and taught for six months in Beirut , Lebanon . He left Fuller Seminary in 1965 because the seminary had moved away from the inerrancy of the Bible.

From 1965 to 1986 he was Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield , Illinois . In 1989 he became emeritus of the faculty.

He spent the rest of his life researching, teaching, and writing books. Archer had a pronounced talent for foreign languages. Every year he learned a new language; It was said that he could speak 27 languages ​​fluently, including unusual ones like Icelandic .

Archer was one of the 50 translators for the New American Standard Bible (NASB) published in 1971. He was also on the translation team for the New International Version (NIV), a translation of the Bible published in 1978.

Teaching

Archer became known, among other things, for his adherence to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy . He defended it by proposing harmonizations and by exegesis on apparent contradictions in the Bible. One cannot admit errors in the historical-scientific sense without ending with errors also in doctrinal questions.

His work A Survey of Old Testament Introduction , which was published by Moody Press in Chicago in 1974, was revised by him in 1994 and reissued in 2007 after his death, was a comprehensive introduction to the Old Testament that set standards in the evangelical space. He understood the term survey as a terminus technicus , which for the Old Testament comprised the following topics:

• Philology of the Languages ​​of the Old Testament and Allied Languages
• History of the Hebrew People and Neighboring Peoples
• Religion and culture of the non-Hebrew peoples, which can be explored mainly in archeology
• Authorship
• Period of writing of the books
• Contemporary history
• Original text and text criticism, which is mainly shown in spelling and transcription errors
• Authenticity of the text
• History of text transmission

He justified the divine inspiration of the Old Testament with the remarkable unity, the organic interweaving and the common goal and the pursued plan of the 39 books, which can best be explained with a single intelligence, namely that of the divine author. As the only one of all world religions, the Judeo-Christian also offers a logically tenable epistemology. The Bible claims to give us God's answers to all great questions. It claims to be the special revelation and correct source from which a trustworthy knowledge of religious truth can be obtained.

Archer dealt intensively with the textual criticism, praised the method of the German Old Testament writer Ernst Würthwein and also made seven rules himself:

1. Prefer the older version if it is more conscientious than the younger one
2. Prefer a more difficult reading, provided it is meaningful and not contradicting itself
3. Prefer shorter reading
4. Prefer a reading that explains more variants
5. Prefer a reading with a wider geographical distribution
6. Prefer reading that matches the writer's vocabulary and style
7. Prefer reading that does not reflect doctrinal prejudice

Archer criticized the so-called newer document hypothesis , which flatly denies the authorship of Moses for the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch . A Mosaic authorship is the theory that best fits the facts , given internal and external evidence .

Private

Archer had been married to Virginia Lillian Atkinson since 1939, who died in August 1962. In March 1964 he married Sandra Paula Larsen (* 1937; † 1999), whom he had met a year earlier as a speaker in the chapel of the Fuller Seminary. He had two sons and three daughters. After the death of his second wife, his dementia worsened; from 1999 he was able to live with his daughter Betsy and her family. He died in Sterling, Kansas, in 2004, aged nearly 88, and was buried next to his wife Sandra in Willow Lawn Cemetery in Mundelein , Illinois.

Publications

as sole author

• The reception of Pindar in Germany during the eighteenth century . Dissertation Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 1944.
• In the Shadow of the Cross . Zondervan, Grand Rapids 1957.
• The Epistle to the Hebrews: A Study Manual . Baker Book House, Grand Rapids 1957.
• The Epistle to the Romans: A Study Manual . Baker Book House, Grand Rapids 1959.
• A Survey of Old Testament Introduction . Moody Press, Chicago 1974. Revised 1994 edition, ISBN 0-8024-8200-7 ; 2007, ISBN 0-8024-8434-4 .
  • Introduction to the Old Testament. Volume 1. Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell, 1987. ISBN 3-88002-300-X
  • Introduction to the Old Testament. Volume 2. Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell, 1989. ISBN 3-88002-319-0
• The Book of Job: God's Answer to the Problem of Undeserved Suffering . Baker Book House, Grand Rapids 1982.
• Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties . Zondervan, Grand Rapids (Michigan) 1982, ISBN 0-310-43570-6
• A descriptive catalog of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School Biblical coin collection . Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois 1986.

as a co-author

• with Gregory Chirichigno: Old Testament quotations in the New Testament . Moody Press, Chicago 1983, ISBN 0-8024-0236-4 .
• with Paul Feinberg and Douglas Moo: Three Views on the Rapture . Zondervan, Grand Rapids 1996, ISBN 0-310-21298-7 .
• with Walter C. Kaiser and Ronald F. Youngblood: A Tribute to Gleason Archer . Moody Press, Chicago 1986, ISBN 0-8024-8780-7 .
• with R. Laird Harris and Bruce K. Waltke: Theological wordbook of the Old Testament . Moody Press, Chicago 1980, ISBN 0-8024-8631-2 .
• with Gary Hill: The Discovery Bible. New American Standard, New Testament (Reference Ed.) . Moody Press, Chicago 1987, ISBN 0-8024-4159-9 .
• with Paul D. Gardner, Edward E. Hindson, Daniel R. Mitchell, Frederick Fyvie Bruce , JD Douglas, Edward W. Goodrick, John R. Kohlenberger and Lawrence O. Richards: New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. Zondervan, Grand Rapids 2001, ISBN 978-0-3102-4146-1 .
  • Hard to understand? Christian literature distribution, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 978-3-8939-7656-0

Translations

• Hieronymus : Jerome's commentary on Daniel . Translated by Gleason Leonard Archer, Jr., Baker Book House, Grand Rapids 1958. New edition: Wipf and Stock, 2009, ISBN 978-1-6060-8375-8

literature

• David L. Robbins: Gleason L. Archer . Suffolk University: Boston 1980.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Memorial to Gleason Archer, JETS, March 2005 http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/48/48-1/48-1-pp213-220_JETS.pdf , accessed June 24, 2016.
2. ^ "One cannot allow for error in history-science without also ending up with error in doctrine."; quote without reference.
3. ^ GL Archer: Introduction to the Old Testament, Volume 1. Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell, 1987, ISBN 3-88002-300-X , pages 11-15
4. ^ GL Archer: Introduction to the Old Testament, Volume 1. Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell, 1987, ISBN 3-88002-300-X , pages 16-19
5. ^ GL Archer: Introduction to the Old Testament, Volume 1. Verlag der Liebenzeller Mission, Bad Liebenzell, 1987, ISBN 3-88002-300-X , pages 66-71
6. ^ Gleason L. Archer, Jr .: "A Survey Of Old Testament Introduction." Moody Bible Institute: Chicago 1974, p. 109.
7. ↑ Dr Gleason Leonard Archer, Jr. at Find A Grave, published March 2, 2013, accessed July 6, 2016.