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Billy McMinn

Posted: June 22nd, 2011, 11:42 am
by Jonathan Robie
Carl mentioned Billy McMinn in a post today - I remembered hearing about him and looked up what has been said about Billy McMinn in the mailing list archives and in the prehistoric mailing list archives.

Carl and Carlton both studied under Billy McMinn - did anyone else on the list? Any memories or stories to share?

Re: Billy McMinn

Posted: June 22nd, 2011, 1:47 pm
by cwconrad
Jonathan Robie wrote:Carl mentioned Billy McMinn in a post today - I remembered hearing about him and looked up what has been said about Billy McMinn in the mailing list archives and in the prehistoric mailing list archives.

Carl and Carlton both studied under Billy McMinn - did anyone else on the list? Any memories or stories to share?
I rather think that I'm responsible for most of those posts that will be found in the mailing-list archives and what Jonathan amusingly describes as "the prehistoric archives." Billy McMinn was, I think, a colleague of Carlton Winbery's at New Orleans Baptist Seminary at some point in the middle or later 1950's after McMinn completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Tulane (with a dissertation on the usage and background of the word κοσμοκράτωρ in Eph 6:12). His was a broad and very well-informed mind; he knew his way around theological history as well as the arcane realms of the ancient background of Christianity. He introduced me to Kierkegaard, which never quite took hold with me; I recall he once cited someone's dictum about 20th-century theology: "Love thy Dodd with all thy Barth, and thy Niebuhr as thyself." I don't really think that he thought of himself primarily as a teacher of Greek -- it's just what the Grad School at Tulane found for him to do as a T.A. He ultimately left New Orleans Baptist Seminary because of some statement of behavioral commitment that he objected not so much to conforming to as to being compelled to sign. He left and went to teach in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama and finished his academic career there, so far as I know. Perhaps Bill Warren, who holds a chair in New Testament and Greek at NOBTS and has been a sometime list-member of B-Greek, could fill in some details.

As I recall, we have had on the mailing-list occasional exchanges of anecdotes and memories of other yet more prominent scholars in ancient Greek and/or in early Christian studies. I know we've talked some about Liddell and his daughter Alice, immortalized by Lewis Carroll, perhaps about Benjamin Jowett at Oxford, about Eduard Norden, perhaps others. I have some vivid memories of my own of Werner Jaeger and Arthur Darby Nock at Harvard in the late 1950's.