Using words like brilliant and humble, people tend to get downright effusive when they talk about Fr. Robert G. North, SJ. They’re likely right too. But you’d never get him to admit to the former, probably because he is so much the latter.

In his room, pieces of paper with Arabic, Russian, and Greek letters and accent marks taped to a computer offer clues that, at the very least, an interesting person lives here. They help him write in three of the 20 or so languages with which he has become “only somewhat familiar” in his 87 years. Just don’t try telling this well-published scripture scholar-archaeologist with a reputation as a very interesting, entertaining teacher that people you talk to think he’s anything special.

Fr. Robert North, SJ (top) on the 50th anniversary of his becoming a Jesuit and in the 1930s as a young novice.

“No one is going to begin answering a question about someone by saying ‘Oh, that dummy!’ ” he suggests. Now there’s something you might get Fr. North to admit. He’s no dummy. The facts in that regard seem too clear. When he was very young, his mother, a Navy wife temporarily marooned on the East Coast, schooled her young son at home while waiting for her husband to return from sea. At kindergarten age, her son entered the second grade, then skipped fourth. He became a Jesuit in 1931 after graduating from Creighton Prep in Omaha at age 15. After studying Latin, Greek, and philosophy at Saint Louis University, he taught at Marquette High in Milwaukee. There’s a bit of a tall tale surrounding his two years there. Depending on whom you talk to, the story goes something like this.

A Latin class felt a speech by Cicero they had to translate was too long, too difficult, and incredibly boring. Fr. North dazzled students the next day by coming to class and, after apparently memorizing it overnight, flawlessly recited the 45-minute piece. Teachers in later years would tell the story to their classes and note that if a Jesuit scholastic could memorize Cicero overnight, a Marquette High student could certainly translate him.

“I didn’t memorize anything overnight,” insists Fr. North today. “But from having gone through the entire text day-by-day, three times, through eight months, it was already largely memorized willy-nilly.My only motive was to give them a notion of one real speech that would have been given, with gestures and vocal emphasis, in less than an hour, and correct the impression that Cicero's First Catilinarian was a labored and boring harangue… At the end I said nothing about [my intent], presuming that it would be evident enough. And I certainly did not crow anything to the effect that, if I can memorize it, you can translate it.”