Passing of Charles Cranfield (1915-2015)

A number of bloggers, especially those of us who studied at Durham, are noting the passing of C. E. B. Cranfield. He was around 80 years old when I was in Durham and was unfortunately one of those individuals who had such extreme curvature of the spine that he walked most uncomfortably hunched at what approached a 90 degree angle.

Nijay Gupta's interview with him gives a great sense of his humility and kind spirit, always welcome to visits from students at the university, although I never had any extensive contact with him myself. There were fun stories (in retrospect) about a long-standing rivalry between him and Kingsley Barrett for students.

Cranfield had the unfortunate honor of producing the last major commentary on Romans before the advent of the new perspective on Paul. Despite what you may have heard, there is no going back, not completely. Even those who oppose the new perspective have changed. Cranfield's commentary was destined to be a final monument to the old perspective, produced as it was in the late 70s.

None of that negates the greatness of this man, truly a man after God's own heart. He may not approach the throne with boldness, but the Lord will welcome him with delight.

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.