Biography
Smith was born in Philadelphia on May 29, 1915. He received his bachelor's degrees from Harvard College and the Harvard Divinity School, a Ph.D. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Th.D. in theology from Harvard Divinity School. He taught at Brown University and Drew University and then he became a teacher at Columbia University in 1957. He became professor emeritus in 1985 and continued as a lecturer in religion until 1990. He died of heart failure on July 11, 1991 in New York City.
Morton Smith was well known for his sharp wit when it came to religious debates. He made regular scholarly contributions in many fields, including but not limited to: Greek and Latin classics, New Testament, Patristics, second-temple Judaism, and rabbinics. Despite the numerous claims of forgery against Smith's finding, Smith was seen as a dedicated scholar when it came to research. He was said to have devoted fifteen years of his life to just studying his finding of the Secret Gospel.
Read more about this topic: Morton Smith
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)