Archer's father was Gleason Archer, Sr., the founder of Suffolk University in Boston. Archer graduated in 1938 with a B.A. from Harvard University (summa cum laude in Classics) and received an LL.B. from Suffolk Law School in 1939, the same year he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. In 1940 he received a masters degree and in 1944 he was awarded a Ph.D. at Harvard University in Classics. Finally he received his Bachelor of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1945.

Career

Archer served as a Pastor of Park Street Church in Boston from 1945 to 1948. He then became a Professor of Biblical Languages at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California from 1948 to 1965. From 1965 to 1986 he served as a Professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He became an emeritus faculty member in 1989. The remainder of his life was spent researching, writing, and lecturing.

Archer served as one of the 50 original translators of the NASB published in 1971. He also worked on the team which translated the NIV Bible published in 1978.

His defense of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy by proposing harmonizations and exegesis regarding inconsistencies in the Bible made Archer a well known biblical inerrantist. He stated: "One cannot allow for error in history-science without also ending up with error in doctrine."^[1] He was critical of the documentary hypothesis which denies the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch