Biography

Emeritus Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham, James D. G. Dunn is a New Testament scholar widely known for his writings on the Holy Spirit, the apostle Paul, and Jesus, as well as for his studies of the evolution of the historical critical method and the relation between Christianity and Judaism in the first century. He graduated from the University of Glasgow, where he took both a master’s degree in economics and statistics and a bachelor of divinity degree, and received his Ph.D. in New Testament studies from Cambridge University in 1968. A licensed minister of the Church of Scotland, he served as senior assistant minister of St. David’s Church in Knightswood, Glasgow, and as chaplain to overseas students in Edinburgh before beginning his academic career at the University of Nottingham as a lecturer and then a reader in theology.

Appointed professor of divinity at Durham in 1982, he was named Lightfoot Professor in 1990, a post he held for thirteen years. Prof. Dunn twice chaired Durham’s theology department and was director of its Centre for Theological Research. He also has been the Sir Derman Christopherson Foundation Fellow at Durham. A former Joseph McCarthy Visiting Professor at the Gregorian University in Rome, he has been a visiting professor at Fuller Theological Seminary and at New College, Berkeley, and has delivered invited lectures at numerous colleges, universities, and seminaries in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Prof. Dunn was founding chairman of the Association of University Departments of Theology and Religious Studies in the United Kingdom and has served as president of both the British New Testament Conference and of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. He is presently vice president of St. John’s College Council, Durham, chairman of the Wesley Study Centre Management Committee, and a member of the advisory board of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies in Jerusalem. Cambridge University has awarded him honorary bachelor of divinity and doctor of divinity degrees. A former advisory editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament and joint editor of SPCK’s Biblical Foundations in Theology Series, Prof. Dunn is editor of the Cambridge University Press series, Theology of the New Testament, advisory editor of Horizons in Biblical Theology and of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplemental Series, and advisory editor for the Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft.

He is the author of some 180 articles published in academic journals, the editor of six books, including most recently, The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul (Cambridge University Press, 2003), the co-author of two books, and the author of twenty-two others, from the early and influential Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970) and Jesus and the Spirit (1975 and 1997) to the recent Theology of Paul the Apostle (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998) and Jesus Remembered (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), the first volume of a projected three-volume series entitled Christianity in the Making.  In 2006 he was elected to become a fellow of the British Academy.