page_title: G. B. Caird
section_title: Ultimate assessment
hierarchical_section_title: G. B. Caird / Significance / Ultimate assessment
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo taken of the Queen's College on High Street, Oxford, on April 17, 1984, with my Nikon camera, standing on street in front of University College. It is entirely my own work!
context_page_description: George Bradford Caird, FBA, known as G. B. Caird, was an English churchman, theologian, humanitarian, and biblical scholar. At the time of his death he was Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford.
context_section_description: Caird was a complex figure, which makes any attempt to reduce his life and work into a short survey hazardous. However, taking into account the concerns expressed here, certain things may confidently be said of him - most principally that he was a scholar's scholar, and yet one who was (paradoxically) never a pure academic who enjoyed the sequestered safety of his study. His pastoral temperament was frequently at the fore, and for him it required that he do the double duty of preacher-scholar. "To know George you had to hear him preach, for here became apparent one of the great strengths of his life. It was clearly the same man who conducted advanced seminars and helped graduate students to see through the complexities of their work. Many of those who went to his lectures remarked not only on the vigorous academic discipline they were invited to share, but on the direct relationship they were encouraged to see between honest probing and the preaching of the Gospel" (Donald Sykes).
  "He understood the task of the exegete to be not only the discernment of the author's original intention but also the elucidation and proclamation of the Gospel of God. Just as he could hardly endure sermons without intellectual content, so his lectures were truly evangelical".
   Caird would probably have appreciated the Latin inscription (chosen by his wife Mollie) in Mansfield College Chapel: "Fons sapientiae verbum Dei" ("The word of God is the fountain of wisdom") (Jesus ben Sirach 1:5; so Caird's translation for the New English Bible).
  On a scholarly level it may be said of Caird that, "despite his independence, [he] belonged to and typified a marked tradition within British scholarship. Points of similarity with C. H. Dodd, less often with T. W. Manson, are frequent. What Caird displayed in a highly illuminating way is the manner in which theological conviction, literary values, and historical reasoning worked together in that current of learning . . . in this respect the rethinking of Caird's thoughts can be, and is, a contribution to the whole intellectual history of an era". And finally, on a personal level, "those who knew him will never forget that tall figure who seemed to walk faster than anyone else, black Oxford gown trailing him in the breeze, who always spoke in public without notes, and who—perhaps as a fitting symbol of his life—always seemed to be out of the lecture hall before his listeners had written down his last word or had had the opportunity to consider the meaning of what they had just heard".
caption: The Queen's College, Oxford, 27 April 1984. The flag is flying at half mast six days after Caird's death
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