John W. Rogerson

John Rogerson is an eminent biblical scholar and ordained priest of the Church of England. He was born in 1935 in London and after serving in the Royal Air Force, where he worked in intelligence, he took a degree in Theology at the University of Manchester. Among his teachers were H.H. Rowley, John Allegro, F. F. Bruce, S. G. F Brandon and Arnold Anderson. His ministerial training was at Ripon Hall, Oxford, followed by an Honours degree in Oriental Studies at Oxford, where he was taught by, among others, G. R. Driver. He also spent a term at the newly founded St George’s College in Jerusalem. After graduating from Oxford in 1963 he won a scholarship to the Hebrew University, where he studied under Chaim Rabin. In 1964 he moved to Durham as a Lecturer and Tutor at University College, where he was ordained. In 1971, researching in social anthropology, he made the first of many visits to Germany, which initiated his interest in especially 18th and 19th German philosophy and biblical scholarship. In 1975 he was awarded a DD from the University of Manchester and in 1979 was appointed Professor and Head of Department at the University of Sheffield, where he led a renowned group of scholars. Among his many activities he began a series of annual, and extremely popular, student study visits to the Holy Land. He retired in 1996 and has remained an active scholar. A Festschrift in his honour, The Bible in Human Society, was published in 1995, on his retirement from the Sheffield Chair. He has been awarded Honorary degrees from Universities of Aberdeen (1998) and Freiburg (2006). John Rogerson’s interests range widely from linguistics and philosophy to German biblical scholarship, Palestinian topography and social anthropology. As Clines (1998; 23) remarks: ‘There proved to be almost no area to which Old Testament studies could be related in which John Rogerson did not make himself a master’. He was for many years the Secretary of the British Society for Old Testament Study and was its President in 1989. He is a keen musician and plays the cello, and continues an active ministry at Beauchief Abbey, Sheffield, as well as academic and pastoral writing.

Selected writings

Books

• “The Hebrew Conception of Corporate Personality”, Journal of Theological Studies 21 (1970): 1-6.
• Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (De Gruyter, 1974)
• Psalms [with John McKay] (CUP, 1977)
• The Supernatural in the Old Testament (Lutterworth, 1978)
• Anthropology and the Old Testament (Blackwell, 1979)
• Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (SPCK, 1984)
• Beginning Old Testament Study (SPCK, 1988)
• The Old Testament World [with Philip R Davies] (CUP 1989)
• Atlas of the Bible (Phaidon, 1989)
• Introduction to the Bible (Penguin, 1999)
• Theory and Practice in Old Testament Ethics (T&T Clark, 2006)
• A Theology of the Old Testament (SPCK, 2009)

References

David J. A. Clines, ‘The Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies: An Intellectual Biography’ in David J. A. Clines and Stephen D. Moore (eds), Auguries. The Jubilee Volume of the Sheffield Department of Biblical Studies (JSOT Supplements, 269; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 1-70. John William Rogerson, Crockford’s Clerical Directory (Church House Publishing), p. 715 [2014-15 edition]. http://beauchiefabbeypress.org.uk