RD Wilson International Free Seminary
Our Online Net Seminary is named after the great apologist Dr. Robert Dick Wilson (February 4, 1856 – October 11, 1930) was an American linguist and Presbyterian scholar who made major contributions in verifying the reliability of the Hebrew Bible. In his quest to determine the accuracy of the original manuscripts, Wilson eventually learned 45 languages, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 AD.
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RD Wilson International Net Seminary operates in the following manner: we have developed a curriculum and have uploaded all the course material on the net. You can download the entire seminary curriculum and textbooks of this seminary from this website. There is not restriction. NO fees is involved. Everything in this seminary is free. Once you download the entire seminary material, you can study it all according to your convenience and your timetable. In case you are interested in a seminary diploma and transcripts, you should contact Trinity School of Apologetics that you can find through a simple search on the Internet. Inform Trinity that you have completed a study of the material you freely download from the RD Wilson International Free Seminary, and they will tell you how you can obtain your Seminary diploma and transcripts free of cost. |
Wilson was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He proved himself an outstanding language student even as an undergraduate. While at Princeton University, he was able to read the New Testament in nine languages. He graduated from Princeton at the age of 20, later receiving a master’s degree and doctorate before doing post-graduate work in Germany at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1883, Wilson became Professor of the Old Testament at Western Theological Seminary (later known as Pittsburgh Theological Seminary), where he had done some of his graduate studies. In 1900, he returned to Princeton as the William Henry Green Professor of Semitic Languages and Old Testament Criticism at Princeton Theological Seminary.
To him language was the gateway into alluring fields that drew him strongly. He prepared himself for college in French, German, and Greek, learned Hebrew by himself, and took a hundred dollar prize in Hebrew when he entered the seminary.
"I would read a grammar through, look up the examples, making notes as I went along, and I wouldn’t pass by anything until I could explain it. I never learned long lists of words, but I would read a page through, recall the words I didn’t know, and then look them up. I read anything that I thought would be interesting to me if it were in English. I got so interested in the story that I was unconscious of the labor–as a man is interested in his roses, and doesn’t think of the thorns. So I learned Greek, Latin, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, and so on."
He could not at that time learn Babylonian in America, so he went to Heidelberg, determined to learn every language that would enable him the better to understand the Scriptures, and to make his investigations in original documents.
So to Babylonian he added Ethiopic, Phoenician, all the Aramaic dialects, and Egyptian, Coptic, Persian and Armenian. He studied in Berlin with Schrader, who was Delitzsch’s teacher, called the father of Assyriology. He studied his Arabic and Syriac under Sachau, and Arabic under Jahn and Dieterichi; Hebrew under Dillmann and Strack, and Egyptian under Brugsch. He became conversant with some twenty-six languages in these years devoted to language acquisition.
For Professor Wilson had a plan, carefully worked out during his student days in Germany, under which he proposed to spend fifteen years in language study, fifteen years in Biblical textual study in the light of the findings of his studies in philology, and then, God willing, fifteen years of writing out his findings, so that others might share them with him. And now it is our privilege in this booklet to read, in terms that we all can understand, some of the gloriously reassuring facts that he has found in his long pilgrimage through ancient days. [Portions taken from GFDL Document and Public Domain Document]