Longtime Samford University Professor Sigurd Bryan, who taught Old Testament in parts of six different decades, has died.

Bryan, a professor from 1956-2002, died on March 8. He was 96.

“He’s really one of the saints of Samford,” said Jim Barnette, professor of ministry and missions at Samford and senior pastor of Brookwood Baptist Church. “He was so highly esteemed by students and faculty. He was a giant, a humble giant. There are just few people that touched so many lives in such a quiet and humble way.”

Bryan began teaching Old Testament in 1956-57, the last year Howard College was located in East Lake before moving to Homewood. Howard College changed its named to Samford University in 1965. Bryan retired in 2002 at age 78.

"If the calendar did not say I had been here 46 years, I would not believe it," Bryan told the Birmingham News at the time. "It seems like yesterday that I came."

In his last academic year, Bryan taught more than 230 students. Over the decades, thousands of students took his his Old Testament survey courses. He also preached in Baptist pulpits throughout Alabama.

Bryan graduated from Howard in 1946, then earned a divinity degree and doctor of theology degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

“I thought perhaps I’d be a pastor,” Bryan said. But the opportunity to teach at his alma mater became a career.

“I enjoy studying and teaching the Bible and that’s what I’ve been allowed to do for 46 years,” he said at the time of his retirement. “I love the stories that are in the Bible. I have enjoyed sharing that and introducing the Bible to students. Some of the students have never had any Bible before, some have been in Sunday School all their lives; I try to give them all an overview of the Bible.”

Bryan said he never tried to steer students to a literal interpretation.

“The Bible can be interpreted differently by different people,” Bryan said. “I’ve always tried to stay in the middle of the road.”

But he never wavered in his belief in the importance of the Old Testament for Christians. “The best background for a study of the New Testament is the Old Testament,” Bryan said. “Jesus said he had not come to destroy the law, that he had come to fulfill it. The only Bible the early Christians had was the Old Testament.”