Leading evangelical Bible scholar Frederick Fyvie Bruce died of cancer at his home in Buxton, Derbyshire, England, on September 11, one month short of his eightieth birthday.
Author of nearly 50 books and several thousand articles, essays, and reviews, he was one of only two people elected to the presidencies of both the prestigious Society of Old Testament Studies and the Society of New Testament Study. From 1959 to 1978 he was the John Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at Manchester University.
Born October 12, 1910, in Elgin, Scotland, to a devout Plymouth Brethren home (his father was an itinerant evangelist), he possessed a love of the Bible and languages from his childhood. Studying both Greek and Latin from age 10, Bruce distinguished himself in the classics successively at the Elgin Academy, the University of Aberdeen, and Cambridge University, where he graduated at the top of his class. He was awarded an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Aberdeen University in 1957.
Bruce never intended to become a professor of biblical studies, and never actually took a formal course in either Bible or theology, much less earned a degree. Following a stint as a research student in Indo-European philology at the University of Vienna (1934–35), he taught Greek at Edinburgh (1935–38) and Leeds (1938–47) universities.
Bruce’s commentary on the Greek text of Acts, published first in 1951 and recently revised, marked the beginning of a new era in biblical studies for evangelical Christians, for it was the first work by an evangelical for more than a generation to be taken seriously by the general academic community. Bruce published more than a book a year throughout the rest of his life. Most widely circulated is his The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? in which he looks at the subject through the eyes of classical scholarship.
He also edited the New International Commentary on the New Testament, and important journals, such as The Palestine Exploration Quarterly and The Evangelical Quarterly. He served as contributing editor for CHRISTIANITY TODAY from 1956 until 1978.
Bruce is survived by his wife, Betty; a son, who is a classical scholar living in Canada; a daughter, who lives in Australia; and seven grandchildren.
