Dr. Bruce Manning Metzger (1914 – 2007) was a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and served on the board of the American Bible Society. He was a scholar of Greek, New Testament and Old Testament, and wrote prolifically on these subjects. Dr. Metzger was an editor of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, published in 1966, and a past chairman of the American Bible Society’s committee on translation.

As a scholar, Dr. Metzger was known in particular for his close textual studies of the New Testament and the Apocryphal literature, books that are not part of a recognized canon. He also wrote about the Bible as it was rendered by Eastern branches of the church — Greek, Slavonic, Georgian, Ethiopic, Syrian and Armenian — drawing on his command of ancient and modern languages. Besides Greek, Latin and Hebrew, Dr. Metzger knew Coptic, Syriac, Russian, German, Spanish, French and Dutch, among others.

Among his dozens of books are “The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations” (Clarendon, 1977); “Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Palaeography” (Oxford University, 1981); “Breaking the Code: Understanding the Book of Revelation” (Abingdon, 1993); and “The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions” (Baker Academic, 2001). With Michael D. Coogan, Dr. Metzger edited The Oxford Companion to the Bible, published in 1993.