G. B. Caird

George Bradford Caird (1917–1984)

George Bradford Caird was born on July 17, 1917, in Sutton, Surrey, into a Congregationalist household. The tradition shaped him from the start: a gathered church, a high regard for Scripture, and a suspicion of any authority standing between the believer and the text. He was educated at Mill Hill School, a Nonconformist foundation in north London, and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read classics before turning to theology. He went on to Mansfield College, Oxford, the great Congregational seminary, where the discipline of philology he had acquired as a classicist was joined to a training in biblical criticism. The pairing marked everything he later did. He read the Bible as a scholar reads any ancient literature, closely and without sentiment, and he never separated that reading from the life of the church.

He was ordained in 1943 and served as minister of Highgate Congregational Church in London during the last years of the war. He married Viola Mary Newport Pollard, and they had two sons. The pastorate was short, but he did not leave the pulpit behind when he moved to the lecture hall. His later work keeps the preacher's habit of asking what a text means for people who must hear it and act on it.

In 1946 he crossed the Atlantic to become Professor of Old Testament at McGill University in Montreal. It was an unusual assignment for a man who would be remembered chiefly as a New Testament scholar, and it gave him a grounding in Hebrew Scripture that many of his colleagues lacked. He read the New Testament as a Jewish book, written by people who thought in the categories of the Old. After four years he returned to Oxford in 1950 as a tutor and fellow of Mansfield College. He was to be associated with the college for most of his working life, and he served as its Principal from 1970 to 1977. Those years coincided with the merger of the English Congregational churches into the United Reformed Church in 1972, so that he ended his career in a denomination different from the one in which he had begun, though not one he had left.

In 1977 he was appointed Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford, with a fellowship at Queen's College, one of the senior chairs in biblical studies in the English-speaking world. He had been elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1973. By then he was widely regarded as one of the most careful and also one of the most readable biblical scholars in Britain. Students remembered him as a lucid, courteous teacher, exact in his judgments and impatient only with carelessness. His public manner was reserved, and he left little record of his inner life beyond what his scholarship reveals.

He died in Oxford on April 21, 1984. At his death he was still at work on a large project, a comprehensive New Testament theology. It was unfinished, and it was later completed from his notes and lectures by his student L. D. Hurst and published in 1994.

His Writing and Its Influence

Caird's books grew out of lectures, commentaries, and the classroom, and they share a plain, economical prose that is unusual in technical biblical scholarship. His first major work for general readers was The Apostolic Age (1955), a short history of the early church. Principalities and Powers (1956) followed, a study of the spiritual forces in Pauline theology that was later taken up in discussions of how evil operates through institutions and structures. In the 1960s he wrote commentaries on Luke and on Revelation, and a book of lectures, Jesus and the Jewish Nation. He also worked on the translation of the New English Bible, an exercise that suited a classicist who cared about exact rendering.

Two concerns run through all of it. The first is that the Bible's language is figurative, and that reading it well means understanding how metaphor works. He developed this most fully in The Language and Imagery of the Bible (1980), which treats biblical imagery as a way of saying true things that literal statement cannot carry. The second follows from the first. Caird argued that the apocalyptic language of Daniel, the Gospels, and Revelation, with its collapsing stars and heavenly thrones, used cosmic imagery for events within history and for their meaning. On this reading, the coming of the Son of Man in the Gospels points to Jesus' vindication and to the judgment that fell on Jerusalem, and does not point to the dissolving of the physical universe. His commentary on Revelation applies the same method. John is addressing churches under pressure from Roman power, and the beasts and the harlot belong first to that world. Caird did not suppose the book was therefore exhausted by its first century. He thought it spoke to every age in which the church faces the same temptations.

The thesis was not universally accepted. Scholars who insist that Jesus and the early church expected a literal end of the cosmos have argued that Caird made the texts more congenial to modern readers than the evidence allows. Readers formed by futurist or dispensationalist schemes find his Revelation unrecognizable. These objections are serious, and his best work answers them by close argument and does not dismiss them. He was a patient arguer who set out his reasoning step by step and let readers check it.

His influence is easier to trace through other scholars than through any school of his own. His student L. D. Hurst completed the New Testament Theology from Caird's notes in 1994, and the book bears the marks of a work assembled after the author's death. N. T. Wright, who studied at Oxford in Caird's time, has acknowledged a deep debt, and the reading of apocalyptic language as metaphor for historical events became central to Wright's account of Jesus. Caird's work on the powers, and his insistence that Paul took them seriously without turning them into a demonology, remained a point of reference for later writers on the subject. Several of his books were reissued after his death, which suggests that readers still find use for a scholar who avoided both skepticism and credulity.

Who should read Caird: Pastors, teachers, and students who want to know how to read the Bible's imagery without flattening it into literalism or dismissing it as ancient superstition. He is especially useful to anyone who has been frightened or confused by Revelation and wants a guide who takes both the text and its first readers seriously. He is not for those looking for devotional warmth, nor for readers committed to a literal future timetable, who will find him an adversary. His scholarship is also of its period, and the specialist literature has moved on. What lasts is the discipline of his method, which is to read slowly, ask what the words did for their first hearers, and trust that this serves the church better than speculation.