Smith, Morton
SMITH, MORTON. Robert Morton Smith was born in Philadelphia on May 28, 1915, the son of the physician Rupert Henry Smith and his wife Mary (Funk). He received a B.A. from Harvard in 1936, with a major in English. Thereafter he continued at Harvard Divinity School (S.T.B. 1940), where he studied the New Testament (NT) under Henry Cadbury, Judaism under Harry A. Wolfson, and Greco-Roman religions under Arthur D. Nock. At Wolfson's urging he learned rabbinic Hebrew as background to NT studies. He was awarded a travel fellowship for study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he was stranded by the outbreak of World War II, but he used the time to complete a doctoral dissertation, written in Hebrew, submitted in 1945, accepted in 1948, and published in English translation as Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels (1951). From 1948 to 1950 he returned to Harvard Divinity School, where he eventually earned a Th.D. in 1957 with a controversial thesis, eventually published in 1971 as Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament. His first teaching appointments were as instructor and then assistant professor in biblical literature at Brown University (1950–1955), followed by a year as visiting professor in the history of religions at Drew University (1956–1957).
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