Everett Ferguson

Everett Ferguson, born 18 February 1933, joined the Bible faculty at Abilene Christian University in 1962 and taught church history and Greek there for more than thirty years. He had already taken a bachelor's degree and a first master's at the same institution in the mid 1950s, then a doctorate at Harvard. He stepped back from full-time teaching at the end of the nineties to concentrate on research, and he remains distinguished scholar in residence. His subject is the ante-Nicene church and the Jewish, Greek and Roman setting of the New Testament, surveyed in Backgrounds of Early Christianity (1987, third edition 2003) and pressed further in Baptism in the Early Church. He edited The Second Century from 1981 to 1992, co-edited the Journal of Early Christian Studies from 1993 to 1999, and has served as president of the North American Patristics Society. Church History, Volume One, published by Zondervan in 2005 and revised in 2013, runs from Jesus to the eve of the Reformation; John D. Woodbridge and Frank A. James III wrote the companion second volume. Ferguson writes as a believing historian and says so plainly.