Sir William Mitchell Ramsey was born in 1851. He died in 1939. He wrote well over 20 books and he was quite a scholar. He held academic posts at Edinburgh at various

colleges at Oxford and at Aberdeen. Among his professorships he held the post of Regis Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen.

Do you know how you become the Regis Professor?

Well, you get appointed by the Regent, either by the king or the queen.

This is the top academic post held for the brilliant minds, and that was Sir William Ramsey.

He was an archaeologist in his day.

He was the foremost authority on Asia Minor

and he was also a New Testament scholar without peer.

He was born into a house of lawyers. Three generations

of distinguished lawyers came before him. He would later apply those skills of

careful investigation and meticulous interpretation to his work, not as a lawyer, but as an historian.

Well, he was educated at Aberdeen, the place where he ended up as a professor. There, of course, he set himself apart and

above his classmates. As an undergrad, he had a clear sense of his calling to scholarship. He was to be devoted to the life of discovery. He received a three-year

scholarship from Exeter College in Cambridge to research on location in Greek lands right

after he got his undergrad degree and that of course

set him on his career path. Well the prevailing thought of the day regarding

the New Testament in those academic circles and authorship of the books of the New Testament

was dominated by the work of Ferdinand Christian Bauer and this school was called

the Tubingen School of Thought and Interpretation.

Ramsey initially fell in with this group.

This group believed that most of Paul's epistles were not written by Paul, only maybe four of them were written by Paul.

Most of the New Testament came much later sometime in the second half of the second century,

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