Benajah Harvey Carroll was born in Mississippi and raised in Texas. He was a soldier for the Confederate army. In 1865, at the age of twenty two, he converted to Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting after taking up a preacher's challenge to experiment with Christianity. After the war, he was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Waco and later the founder of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, still the largest seminary in the world. He was a powerful leader of the Southern Baptist Convention and was a formidable foe in the political controversies that often arose. He almost always found himself on the conservative side of such issues. He was mildly Calvinistic and a postmillieniallst. He stood strongly against Modernism and Catholicism. He believed that preaching was the essence of the pastor's duty; he was an expositor in the truest sense. He believed in the authority and the inspiration of the Bible first and foremost. He criticized and chided the "Higher Criticism" teachers as being false brethren. Carroll published 33 volumes of works, and is best known for his 17-volume commentary, An Interpretation of the English Bible. Benajah Harvey Carroll died November 11, 1914, and is buried at the Oakwood Cemetery in Waco, Texas.
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