In Memoriam: Professor Gordon Wenham

The recent death of Gordon Wenham was an immense loss to both biblical scholarship and the Church. One of the outstanding biblical scholars of his generation, he was also a faithful Christian who dedicated his scholarship to the service of Christ and his Church. His loss is felt not only by his family, but by generations of colleagues and students, who benefited from his learning and also came to admire and love him.

He was outstanding, first, for his intellectual range. He brought to his Old Testament scholarship an immense knowledge of the biblical and cognate languages, of the history and geography of the Bible, and of its theology. His reach is evident in the huge number of his books and articles listed in his Festschrift, Reading the Law*. His King’s College London PhD thesis on Deuteronomy (1970), unpublished but influential, established his interest in biblical and Ancient Near Eastern law. His two-volume Word commentary on Genesis shed fresh light on the biblical world in which it was written, and is still a standard text. On Leviticus his fertile scholarly imagination took him into the field of anthropology, producing important insights for the understanding of that book and its kindred literature. His love of the Hebrew Bible, and Hebrew itself, made him an assiduous and exacting exegete, as his students knew well, and this led him to explore various methods of reading texts, such as narrative analysis and text-linguistics, on which he supervised several doctoral theses.

Gordon was a dedicated teacher. When he moved in 1981 from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) to the then unpretentious College of St Paul and St Mary in Cheltenham, he established and built up the Old Testament as a serious research area. During his twenty years or so at that institution (which became the University of Gloucestershire in 2002) he attracted dozens of research students from every continent. His success enabled other appointments to be made, culminating in the endowment of a New Testament Chair. At its height as a research area, Biblical Studies at the University of Gloucestershire enjoyed an international reputation.

He also attached great importance to undergraduate teaching, and was well-known for his imaginative communication skills and quirky sense of humour. (His sacrifice of the teddy-bear became legendary.)

Gordon’s tireless work of recruiting and training research students, often from the developing world, was distinctly missional in character. His own work of biblical interpretation often tended towards theology, ethics and spirituality. He was for years a committed member of the Tyndale Fellowship, and for a time Chair of the Old Testament Study Group. This was a measure of his identification with evangelical Christianity and also of his purposeful encouragement of others on the same pathway. When he retired from the University of Gloucestershire, he taught courses and supervised PhD students for several years at Trinity College Bristol, whose primary work is the training of Anglican clergy.

Gordon was something of a prophet, never afraid to take a stand for what he believed was right, even though it might be unpopular to do so. This steadfastness was a hallmark of the person and his work, and it gave him an immense stature among those who knew him well.

He was in fact widely admired, by no means only in evangelical circles. He was well-known and liked in the Society for Old Testament Study, the professional guild of Old Testament scholars in the UK. He had academic links with people of widely varying theological or other backgrounds, and often attracted scholars of international repute, from the UK and beyond, to give lectures and seminars at the University of Gloucestershire. His own recognition as an international scholar is attested in the cast of contributors to his Festschrift.

I was privileged to be his first PhD student, at QUB. I remain deeply indebted to him for his careful mentoring, both at that time and later as a colleague, as are dozens of others who came after me. Gordon was driven above all by a sense of mission to promote the Gospel and to serve Christ and the Church. In his scholarship, and among colleagues and students, he was thoroughly unselfish. He was also a devoted family man, and a loyal and generous friend.

Our heartfelt sympathies go out to his wife Lynne, their sons and daughters, John, Mary, Lizzie and Christopher, and their families.