How does one adequately express great gratitude to someone who changed your life, forever, for the better? David was not only my mentor, he was the mentor to my first mentor, Dwight Pryor. David was the catalyst that brought untold thousands of Christians into a clearer, deeper, and profoundly more intimate relationship with Jesus and the world in which He lived and taught. David himself was mentored by Dr. Robert L. Lindsey and Professors David Flusser and Shmuel Safrai.
Together they taught and inspired many great scholars such as Dwight Pryor, Brad Young, Randall Buth, Halvor Ronning, and Steven Notley. These men along with many other great scholars formed the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research and its publication Jerusalem Perspective to share their research with the world.
David was known as Mr. Hebrew owing to his love of the Hebrew language and its importance for understanding the gospels. He was also fluent in ancient Greek, and so much so, that he could speak it in casual conversation. He was a scholar par excellence! Very few scholars have David’s grasp of the Biblical languages and the cultural and historical background of the scriptures that enabled him to see with greater clarity and depth into the teachings of Jesus. His work and research have inspired countless believers to study and teach with greater understanding of what Jesus lived and taught. His passing is a great loss.
I will miss the many conversations that I had with David. He encouraged me more than anyone else to “study to show myself approved unto God, a worker who is not ashamed because he can rightly interpret the word of God.” I am eternally grateful for the life of David Bivin.
