Cancer claims religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan at 82. The Yale University professor wrote more than 30 books and was one of the world's foremost authorities on the history of Christianity.
LIANE HANSEN, host: Yale University Professor Jaroslav Pelikan, one of the world's foremost authorities on the history of Christianity, died last week. He wrote more than 30 books, including the massive, five-volume set, The Christian Tradition. Born in 1923 in Ohio to a Serbian mother and Slovak father, Pelikan was raised as a Lutheran but converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.</s>LIANE HANSEN, host: He joined the Yale faculty in 1962 and later was named a Sterling Professor, an honor achieved only by the institution's most distinguished academics. The National Endowment for the Humanities gave Pelikan its highest honor, The Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, which he delivered in 1983. He was also appointed by President Clinton to serve on his committee on the Arts and Humanities. His awards and towering intellect never diminished Pelikan's sense of humor and humility. One of his sons said, For a man as talented and as accomplished as he was, he was also exceptionally kind and genuinely humble. The more he learned, the more amazed he was by how much he did not know.</s>LIANE HANSEN, host: Jaroslav Pelikan was a guest on this program a number of times, most recently last year when he published his book, Whose Bible Is It? The work explored how people of different faiths, languages and cultures varied in their interpretations of the Bible. He was interviewed by Sheilah Kast, who posed the same question as the title of his book, Whose Bible Is It?</s>Prof. JAROSLAV PELIKAN (Professor, Yale University): Without giving away the plot of the whole book, I end up saying that's not an appropriate question. It's at best presumptuous and at worst blasphemous, because the Bible doesn't belong to any human being, the Bible belongs to God. But the question of who has the right way of looking at it, my final answer is that Christians and Jews need each other in an effort to understand the sacred text they share.</s>LIANE HANSEN, host: In the preface to that book, Jaroslav Pelikan said his motivation to write it came from a question his Russian-born aunt Vonda once asked: Tell me, what do you think of Bible? Sheilah Kast asked him what his aunt Vonda would think of Whose Bible Is It?</s>Prof. JAROSLAV PELIKAN (Professor, Yale University): I suppose she would say at the end, you talk about everybody else, but you don't tell me what you think of Bible, which is of course what I've done all my life. I duck by retreating to 20 centuries and by the time I'm done reciting the 20 centuries, people are pretty nearly exhausted and then can't subject me to cross-examination.</s>LIANE HANSEN, host: Religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan, he died last week at the age of 82.