Lucetta Mowry dies

Thanks to Gail Dawson for passing along this sad news from the Washington Post:

Biblical Scholar Lucetta Mowry Dies
By Patricia Sullivan

M. Lucetta Mowry, 91, a biblical scholar, archaeologist and former dean at Wellesley College, died of pneumonia Feb. 23 at Northwest Hospital Center in Randallstown, Md. She lived in Sykesville, Md.

Dr. Mowry was a professor and academic dean at Wellesley for 36 years, retiring in 1981. She was a well-known New Testament scholar and author and taught on Hebrew scripture, Islam, Hinduism, modern Japanese religious sects and Gandhi's theory and practice of nonviolence.

She was part of the interdenominational committee set up by the National Council of Churches to update the Revised Standard Version of the Bible into contemporary but accurate language, a painstaking project that began in 1975 and lasted until the new version was published in 1989. Dr. Mowry's responsibility was translation of the Gospel according to John and the Johannine Epistles, and she was one of two committee members who were chosen to edit the completed translations . . . .

. . . . . As an archaeologist, she took part in two excavations in Jordan and one in Libya, where she dived into a harbor and found a 2nd-century Roman sea wall.

Her publications deal with subjects ranging from music in the Bible and poetry in the New Testament to the worship of the Hindu god Siva, called Saivism, in southern India and analysis of excavations at Herodian Jericho. Best known is her "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church," which the London Times Literary Supplement acclaimed as one of the 13 best books in the field of religion written by American authors in the 1960s.

She held Wellesley's Andrew W. Mellon emeritus professorship in the humanities . . . . .