Passing of C.K. Barrett

Just read on James McGrath's blog that C. K. ("Kingsley") Barrett has passed.  What a nice man.  A scholar and a gentleman.  His article in Bultmann's 1955 Festschrift, if I remember correctly, was instrumental in some of my earliest forays into Hebrews, in which he argued that Hebrews has both an apocalyptic and a Platonic dimension.

I met Barrett once in Durham and told him that.  His mild mannered response was something like, "I don't much remember what I wrote in it.  Might not even agree with it any more."

He was a Methodist who preached in the countryside from time to time.  I remember someone saying that he had become a bit of a question mark to some of the formerly coal mining congregations in Durham County.  He of course didn't bring any critical considerations into his preaching, so they had difficulty, I inferred, reconciling his scholarly writings with his preaching.  Of course it makes perfect sense to me. ;-)

I've often envied what I took to be his life.  I've sometimes wondered if I've stretched myself so thin that I will die at a relatively young age.  He always seemed so calm and to have such a leisurely scholarly life of ease at Durham (although I heard once that he and Cranfield were fierce competitors there).  He lived to be 94.