Robert Grant —
Sunken Submarines
As he picks his way through
the close quarters of the Museum of Science and Industry’s
U-Boat 505 exhibit, Robert Grant quickly points out that
he’s more interested in destroyed submarines than
preserved ones.
In fact, the Carl Darling
Buck professor emeritus of New Testament and early Christianity
has spent the past 77 years attempting to correct the historical
record of the places and events surrounding the sinkings
of World War I German U-boats. He traces his research back
to his ninth year, when his Aunt Eleanor gave him a copy
of Lowell Thomas’s Raiders of the Deep.
“The lost U-boats
seemed highly mysterious, especially when in the Evanston
Public Library I compared Thomas’s accounts with those
of others,” he says. “I started to correct my
copy of Raiders confidently and in ink.”
Those first historical corrections started Grant on a path
that eventually led to two books: U-Boats Destroyed
(1964) and U-Boat Intelligence (1969).
His
latest book, U-Boat Hunters, which corrects the
other two, is due this year from Periscope Publishing. Hunters
is based on divers’ recent explorations of destroyed
U-Boats off the British and Belgian coasts. And it’s
remarkable how much history has gotten wrong. “If
you claim you sank a U-boat, divers can go down and take
a look,” Grant says. “In most cases there’s
nothing—the boats got away.”
Grant likes to think that
his work on U-boats and his scholarly work is “all
the same thing: finding new materials.” In his former
day job as a professor in the Divinity School, he published
47 books on early Christianity, on topics ranging from gnosticism
to the Dead Sea Scrolls. His latest, Second-Century
Christianity: A Collection of Fragments, will be published
this spring by Westminster Press. Like Hunters,
it corrects his previous work on the topic.
Quips Grant, “I’ll
spend my retirement correcting myself.”
—S.A.S.
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