Moisés Silva

Moisés Silva (born September 4, 1945) is a Cuban-born American biblical scholar and translator.

Biography

Silva was born in Havana, Cuba, and has lived in the US since 1960. He has taught biblical studies at Westmont College (1972–1981), Westminster Theological Seminary (1981–1996), and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (1996–2000), where he was the Mary French Rockefeller Distinguished Professor of New Testament until his retirement. A past president of the Evangelical Theological Society (1997), Silva for many years had been an ordained minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He served as a translator of the New American Standard Bible, the New Living Translation (Ephesians–Philemon), the English Standard Version and the Nueva Versión Internacional, and as a New Testament consultant for Eugene Peterson's The Message. He has also authored or coauthored several books and articles, including a highly acclaimed commentary on Philippians; Invitation to the Septuagint (with Karen Jobes); God, Language, and Scripture; Has the Church Misread the Bible?; and An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics (with Walter Kaiser, Jr.). He is editor of the second edition of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDNTTE), formerly edited by Colin Brown (theologian). He currently resides in Litchfield, Michigan, where he continues his work as an author and editor.

Silva holds degrees from Bob Jones University (BA, 1966), Westminster Theological Seminary (BD, 1969; ThM, 1971), and the University of Manchester (PhD, 1972). At Manchester he studied under F. F. Bruce and James Barr. The latter's The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) was a strong influence on Silva's Biblical Words and Their Meaning (1983, 2nd ed. 1994), which challenged many common linguistic fallacies in biblical interpretation.