New Testament Texts and the Roman World: A Festschrift in Honor of Gerald L. Stevens for His Life and Work as Professor of New Testament and Greek, and Minister of the Gospel

By Ben Skipper

New Testament Texts and the Roman World encapsulates the rich teaching and ministry career of Dr. Gerald Stevens. This Festschrift serves to celebrate this career and Stevens's contributions to the academic guild. The essays in this work resonate with the interests of Stevens--studies in the text of Acts, in Pauline texts, and in John's Apocalypse. Contributors present studies using intertextuality, social-scientific approaches, theological approaches, literary studies in Roman, Jewish, and mythological texts, and consideration of the cultural and historical settings of the texts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666763997

Ben Skipper

Ben Skipper, a RAF veteran, is an avid modeler and writer of military themes, specializing in 20th century subjects. Skipper’s work has been featured in previous Pen & Sword titles and has, on occasion, won prizes.His interest in British armor was cemented by a visit to the Kings Royal Hussars in the early 90s as an undergraduate in the Territorial Army. Upon graduation Ben Skipper joined the RAF, where he served for five years, clocking up the air miles in a range of RAF transport aircraft including the VC10 and C17.It was while serving with the RAF that his first foray into writing occurred, reporting on his experiences of a Kosovo/FYROM tour for an in-service trade magazine. On leaving the RAF, Skipper continued to develop his writing and research skills working within the third sector and NHS researching military and veteran subculture. Some of this work would be used to shape key government veteran policies.

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Introduction

The View from the Sidelines

Jean M. Stevens

Our Beginning

On a Sunday night in early September of 1969, I went to the college department at Main Street Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. That’s when I first saw Gerald Stevens. The college department was holding a mock trial of Jesus, and Gerald was acting as the prosecutor. He played the part well with passion and intensive interrogation. I was impressed and remember thinking, I really want to get to know this guy!

Figure

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. The Harmony Sovereign guitar that brought us together.

About six weeks later I did get to know him. Gerald (or Jerry as I soon renamed him) and a couple of his friends periodically played guitar and sang songs on the steps of Mississippi Hall, the girls’ dorm at USM where I lived my freshman year. In late October, I was returning from visiting a friend at another dorm and joined the group, sitting down on the step next to Jerry. The wind was blowing so Jerry asked me to hold his music to keep the pages from flipping in the wind. He moved a little closer on the step, and I moved that exact distance away. This little interplay happened several times, and later Jerry told me that my keeping my distance and him out of my space intrigued him. At the end of the sing-along Jerry asked if I’d like to get a cup of hot chocolate. We walked across to the HUB (student center), got a cup of hot chocolate, sat down, and began a conversation that has continued for more than fifty years.

Childhood Background

In that first conversation, we pursued the normal questions to learn about each other: Where are you from? Do you have sisters or brothers? Where did you graduate from high school? What is your major? etc. I learned that Jerry was double-majoring in physics and math, which was impressive but not surprising. Jerry’s parents, Harold and Dorothy Stevens, had moved to Hattiesburg a few months earlier and were members of Main Street Baptist Church. Jerry was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, but, six months later, his dad took a personnel managerial job with Chemstrand and moved the family to Pensacola, Florida. Jerry had an older brother, Harold, Jr., and they were inseparable. Jerry’s sister, Cynthia, was born a couple of years later in Pensacola. Once she could walk and talk, she became their little me too who followed her brothers everywhere. From Pensacola, they moved to Decatur, Alabama, then to Slidell, Louisiana, where Jerry graduated from high school, and then to Hattiesburg in the summer of 1969. Jerry’s father was a talented pianist and played in most of the churches where they were members. Jerry literally grew up on the front pew of each church with his dad at the piano. Jerry’s mother made a tradition of reading a Bible story from Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible every night at bedtime. So, from the time he was small, Jerry went to bed every night with stories of the heroes of the Bible dancing in his head.

College Days

Jerry and I were both blessed to have parents that sacrificed to pay for our tuition, books, and room and board at USM. However, anything extra we wanted meant we had to work. The summer of 1969 when Jerry’s family moved to Hattiesburg, Jerry’s dad hired an independent painter, William Minter, to paint the house they had purchased. Jerry had searched for jobs for the summer and the only one he could find was painting at the Marshall Durbin chicken plant, which, putting it mildly, was a foul atmosphere (pun intended). One day when Jerry was walking home from another day at the chicken plant, a truck passed him and then backed up. The driver was William Minter. William recognized Jerry and asked if he was a painter, and Jerry told him he was painting at the chicken plant but wasn’t sure he’d call himself a painter. William then asked Jerry if he liked working at the chicken plant and, of course, Jerry’s response was an emphatic No! William Minter saved Jerry from the chicken plant that day when he offered to let Jerry come work for him. That day began a long, close relationship, and William never failed to have work for Jerry when needed all through college and seminary. William loved to tease Jerry and nicknamed him Pasquale Debussy Esquire, which we surmise was a result of all the Pasquale lunches they shared, Jerry’s love for classical music (as opposed to William’s love for country), and that Jerry was a college boy. William was a deacon at Trinity Baptist Church in Petal, Mississippi, and devoted to his deacon service. When William and his wife had a son, their eighth child, a few years later, they named him Steven Gerald after Jerry.

On our first real date after the hot chocolate conversation, we went for a walk through the campus and continued getting to know each other. Jerry asked me whether I knew Jesus as my Savior. That was a first for me on a date. I had never had any boy ask me anything about my faith and found the question surprising and refreshing. As I got to know Jerry more, I found that my first impression of him that Sunday night at the college department was correct. He was passionate about his faith and always ready to share a witness. As we continued dating, I prayed about our relationship, and God began to reveal to me that even though Jerry might be majoring in physics and math, he would be a minister. I knew deeply in my heart that if we were to marry, I would be a minister’s wife. God was preparing me.

We were active together in the Baptist Student Union, singing in the BSU choir, attending Bible studies and coffee house events, and presenting the musicals of the day, such as Tell It Like It Is and Celebrate Life. One of our favorite things to do on dates was for Jerry to bring his guitar, and we would find a spot on campus and sing together. Jerry wrote a lot of original songs and taught those to me along with some Simon and Garfunkel, Beatles, and other popular songs.

Jerry had an uncanny ability to see potential in others that they could not see in themselves. He did that for, or maybe I should say, to me. As we sang together for fun, he began to sing and teach me some particular songs, such as Henry Mancini’s The Sweetheart Tree. Valentine’s Day was coming up and, unknown to me, Jerry had volunteered us to sing a special at the college department Valentine’s banquet. I found out on the way to the banquet when I asked about the entertainment, and Jerry handed me a program which had us listed as special music. I was terribly shy about singing in front of a group, and Jerry knew that. I was shocked but at that point also cornered. Since we had practiced so much, we did well at the banquet. His defense was that a velvet alto voice like mine should be heard. We began to sing duets together after that, and, the more we sang together, the more at ease I became.

Ministry Call

We married on February 26, 1972, and went to New Orleans on our honeymoon. Little did we know that New Orleans would become central to our life and future. I had only a course or two to finish at USM since I had taken business courses during the summers. Jerry had a year to go. In the fall after we married, Hattiesburg had a citywide James Robison crusade. Jerry and I were both counselors for the crusade, so each night we went down front at the invitation. On the last night at the invitation time, Jerry turned to me and said, I need to go down front, not to counsel, but to respond to God’s call to ministry. I said I know. He was shocked at my response because I had never shared with him what God had been revealing to me about his becoming a minister.

Seminary Days

We began plans for seminary and visited New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Our trip to New Orleans also included several job interviews for me. That visit was quite an experience. The campus interviews and visit were wonderful. However, the city was a challenge. A couple of my job interviews were downtown. Jerry drove me downtown and we parked the car on the street with no visible no parking signs. However, when we came back to our parking spot, the car was not there. Jerry saw a policeman on the other side of the street and asked him to help us. The policeman pointed to a small sign about ten feet off the ground on a pole that said no parking. So, our car had been towed. The policeman said we needed to go to the car lot under the Claiborne bridge at the top end of Canal Street, and a city bus could get us there. We walked up to Canal Street and, being unfamiliar with the buses and their routes, were told by various drivers upon multiple, frustrating attempts that we had boarded the wrong bus. We finally got on the right bus. At the car lot, we bailed out our car, which took all but a few dollars of the cash we had brought with us. We used those remaining couple of dollars for one drive-through hamburger we shared as we headed back to Hattiesburg to start packing.

On August 20, 1973, which we were certain was the hottest day ever in New Orleans, we moved to our campus apartment on Lipsey Street. The apartment was not air-conditioned, and we had not yet bought window air units. My parents helped us move in, and the plan was they would take me back to Hattiesburg so I could finish my job at a law office. So, Jerry had to endure two weeks of sweltering heat and start classes. Two weeks later, my parents brought me and two window air units back to New Orleans. I never have been sure whether Jerry was happier to see me or the air-conditioners.

The weekend before I started my job at a law firm downtown, Jerry helped me practice riding the city bus. Neither of us knew much about riding city buses, but we investigated the routes and determined that the bus I should take was the Express 92. The bus stop was at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Gentilly, so every day Jerry drove me to the stop before he went to class. We set a goal to go through seminary debt free and that I would work so that Jerry could concentrate on his studies. That goal was calculated out to a very tight budget. We had our monthly expenses down to the penny, and if we finished the month with $6.27 in the checking account, we had met our goal. We graduated from seminary debt free as a result.

Jean’s Role

My role was earning my PhT (Putting Hubby Through). In those days, the seminary awarded a PhT Degree to doctoral student wives upon their spouse’s graduation. Mine is framed and proudly hanging at home. I had interviewed for jobs downtown before we moved. The firm where I really wanted to work did not have an opening. The manager of the firm told me that if I was not happy with the job I took to contact him before I tried to move to another job.

By the Christmas holidays, I was very unhappy. Jerry stayed in Hattiesburg after Christmas holidays to paint with William Minter through the January school break. I returned to New Orleans to a job that I had come to dislike intensely. So, I called the manager from the other law firm. He had just received a resignation that created an opening for me. I went for a final interview and took the job. This job-change whirlwind all happened while Jerry was out of town, and long-distance calls were expensive. I wrote Jerry a letter to tell him that if he needed to call me during the day, I was at a new job and gave him the new phone number. When I think about that now, I am really astounded that I made that change without Jerry even knowing, but the event is very telling and shows how truly unhappy I must have been. The new job was at the law firm of Adams and Reese, where I worked until we moved in 1981. I returned to the same firm in 1988 when we moved back to New Orleans for Jerry to teach at the seminary, and I am still working at this firm today.

Seminary education required a lot of reading and writing of papers. Since I was a business major, I typed all of Jerry’s papers. These were the days before any electronic or memory typewriters, so mistakes meant retyping, not just backspacing and correcting. The seminary used the Turabian manual of style. I studied this guide and tried hard to master the rules. However, Jerry got a B on his first paper because I missed a very important footnote formatting rule. Of course, I cried because his B grade was my fault. As a result, I became even more determined to master Turabian. I did master the rules and actually became a source for other students who needed help with Turabian. Student wives could take classes for free, so that first year I was able to take Old and New Testament survey classes and learned so much more biblical history. My eyes were opened to my own Baptist history. I learned that the church I had grown up in was part of the Landmark movement, which I knew nothing about until I took those classes.

Overseas Adventure

Our first overseas adventure was to Israel. Shortly before we moved to the seminary, Jerry got a call from Dr. John E. Barnes, the pastor of our college church, Main Street Baptist, in Hattiesburg. He told Jerry that a retired schoolteacher in the church had a ministry of paying for every seminary student from Main Street to go to Israel with Dr. Barnes in their first year of school. Dr. Barnes was taking a group in November, so she paid Jerry’s way. When my parents heard about this wonderful gift, they were adamant that I should go with Jerry and insisted on paying my way. We insisted on making their gift a loan and paid them back very slowly.

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. On top of the tel of ancient Megiddo on our first trip to Israel.

Traveling to Israel at that time was risky. The Yom Kippur War had just taken place in October, and security was extremely tight. Jerry had been on family vacations to California, so he had flown before. I had never been on a plane, so my first flight was from New Orleans to Tel Aviv, Israel, with a six-hour layover in Amsterdam because the plane of our connecting flight to Israel had been hijacked. We had to wait for another plane to be brought to Amsterdam. Those truly were perilous times for travel. By the time we arrived in Jerusalem, we had been traveling nonstop for thirty-six hours. The experience of being in Israel was indescribable and brought the Bible to life for us. Reading the Bible has never been the same. Experiencing Israel also opened our cultural understanding. After seeing women sweeping their dirt floors as we traveled the dusty roads, we came home feeling like royalty with very thankful hearts and a new appreciation for our circumstances.

Church Ministry

In the late summer of 1974, Jerry was called as pastor of a small, struggling church in Slidell, Bayou Baptist. Jerry and his family had been members of Bayou Baptist throughout Jerry’s junior high and high school days. The salary from the church consisted of use of the parsonage and gas money to commute to the seminary for school. I continued working in the city and commuted on a bus that left Slidell every morning at 6:30 a.m. and returned to Slidell about 7 p.m. each night. Shortly after Jerry took the position at Bayou Baptist, he was ordained to the ministry at Main Street Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. Both of our deacon dads were able to participate in the ordination, which made the service even more special. In the coming years, Jerry would serve as interim pastor at numerous churches throughout his seminary career.

Jerry’s first convert at Bayou was a young man, Wayne, who was reared Catholic but had married his high school sweetheart, a Baptist girl who had attended Bayou Baptist in the past. They lived in an apartment in East New Orleans, and Jerry began to stop by to visit them periodically on his way to and from Slidell. They were expecting their first child and were planning to move back to Slidell. Over time and many conversations, Wayne began to ask questions about a personal relationship with Jesus, and Jerry was able to lead him to the Lord. Wayne and Kathy moved back to Slidell and joined Bayou Baptist. The church had no other young married couples. Kathy began to teach a children’s class. Jerry committed to have a young couples Sunday School class, and, for over a year, Wayne was the only member of the class. Jerry faithfully taught the class as though the room was full. Wayne and Kathy have remained close friends. A large part of our ministry at Bayou Baptist was singing Jerry’s original songs, and we also began to sing for events at other churches. Years later in 1981, when we succumbed to the begging from family and friends to record an album, Wayne and Kathy spent late nights with us at the recording studio and drove us to Ville Platt, Louisiana, to deliver the master recording tape to the plant for production of the album. The album, titled Turn to Jesus, is now available digitally via iTunes. When Jerry is not an interim pastor, he is playing lead electric guitar in the praise band at our home church, First Baptist, New Orleans.

Emerging Call

As Jerry pastored and taught at Bayou Baptist, his ministry call became clearer as a call to teach. Answering that call would require a doctorate, so Jerry resigned from the church in February of 1978, and we moved back to New Orleans for Jerry to start doctoral work. At the time, the seminary did not have enough housing for doctoral students, so we rented a duplex just off Gentilly Boulevard, across the railroad tracks from the seminary and a little closer to the Express 92 bus stop to downtown for me. We joined First Baptist in New Orleans, participated in a wonderful Sunday School class making lifelong friends, and sang in the choir.

Doctoral work meant even more typing of papers plus a dissertation. Jerry dedicated himself to his studies and excelled in his work. One of the real advantages to typing all Jerry’s papers was that my vocabulary increased exponentially. Jerry’s vocabulary was extensive when I met him, and I was always in awe. When Jerry was writing his dissertation, he used a word that the chairman of his doctoral committee told Jerry he could not use because the word was not in the dictionary. Politely, Jerry suggested to his professor, Maybe we should check the Oxford. Indeed, the word was in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, which Jerry knew already, so the word stayed in his dissertation. Jerry’s command of language and ability to communicate difficult concepts in easy-to-understand ways has always been an amazing gift.

Campus Ministry

As graduation approached in 1981, no teaching positions were available. We prayed earnestly for a position, but none came. Jerry began to search for other ministry positions and went to an Alabama day at the seminary where he was encouraged to apply for ministry positions in Alabama. One of those positions was Baptist Campus Ministry at UAB in Birmingham. After multiple interviews and processes, Jerry was hired to serve as campus minister to the undergraduate school at UAB. Although UAB was a commuter school, they had just secured a student center, a remodeled former medical clinic. The location was on a prime corner on the UAB campus, convenient to classes, and the students loved having a place to be between classes. One of the first events we attended was a dedication of the building.

The Birmingham years were filled with activities and lots of college students in our lives and home. When we were asked whether we had children, we would respond, Yes, about eighty-five, and they’re all in college, but the good thing is we don’t have to pay the tuition. Jerry was fully vested in the work with students. He taught Bible studies at the BSU, led mission trips, planned fun weekend events, and attended and led statewide BSU meetings. He became known statewide because of a talent show that he emceed at a statewide meeting. Every year, each BSU was responsible for performing in a talent show emceed by a BSU director. That year, Jerry had gone ahead of me to Shocco Springs Camp. I planned to drive up after work. Just before I left, Jerry called and told me to drop by our townhouse and pick up his PhD graduation gown and his red electric guitar. I was very curious but in a hurry, so I just did as I was asked. That night at the talent show when the emcee was announced, Jerry came sliding onto the stage wearing his graduation gown with his red electric guitar slung around his neck. The kids went wild. He was such a hit that statewide the kids began to call him the Doc of Rock. That talent show was unforgettable and became legendary. To this day, if we run across a student from that time, they still will call him the Doc of Rock.

While the work at the BSU was rewarding, the BSU years also brought heartache. We learned that we would not be able to have children. We had endured years of testing, procedures, and surgeries only to get this sad news. However, God was redemptive in that situation. We met two particular students during our time in Birmingham, John Crider and Donna Baird. Both were active leaders at the BSU, and we became very close to them. John was premed and Donna was in special education. We sang at their wedding, and they had three beautiful daughters, Lindsey, Lauren, and Carissa. The girls became our godchildren. Jerry delighted to perform the wedding ceremonies for both Lindsey and Lauren, who now have children