System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Dr. Johan Christiaan Beker
World-renowned Pauline scholar dies
On Princeton Theological Seminary faculty for 30 years
By Aimee E. Pereda
Tuesday, July 20, 1999
Dr. Johan Christiaan Beker, widely heralded as the most significant American New Testament scholar in the last half of this century, died July 12 in Trenton. He was 75.
Dr. Beker was a faculty member at Princeton Theological Seminary for 30 years and in 1983 was named the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Theology. He retired from that professorship in 1994, at which point he became a fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry.
He was a world-renowned Pauline scholar and the author of the book Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought, a work that probably most changed Pauline scholarship in this century.
He also wrote Paul's Apocalyptic Gospel and Suffering and Hope, which included reflections on his own life as a child in Nazi Germany.
Dr. Beker is remembered by his students and colleagues as "the most genuinely pastoral of all seminary teachers, a man of sensitive caring," according to Dr. Daniel Migliore, a colleague at the seminary.
Dr. Beker's courses "probed the depths of Paul, and he taught them with a certain irreverence, but always as a true believer and a humble servant of the one about whom he taught," Dr. Migliore said.
Dr. Beker was born in Gorsell, Holland, in the years before World War II. He was forced to leave Holland and his family when he was 9 years old, when he went to Germany to work on U-boats in a submarine factory in support of the Nazi war effort.
Those years, including a stay in a Berlin hospital during heavy bombardment, forced him to rethink his original goal of becoming a lawyer, and instead inspired him to study the New Testament. In 1948, he graduated from the University of Utrecht with a bachelor's degree in divinity.
He emigrated to the United States and earned a master's degree in sacred theology at Seabury-Western Seminary in Evanston, Ill., in 1950. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1955.
Before joining the Princeton Theological Seminary faculty in 1964 as a visiting professor, he taught in New York at the Union Theological Seminary's Pacific School of Religion.
In 1966, he was promoted to full professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1983, he was named to the Dearborn Chair at the Princeton Theological Seminary.
Dr. Beker is survived by his wife, Terri Ann Kurosky Beker, and his son, Hendrik David Beker.
Seminary officials said there is no official word yet on funeral or memorial services.
