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Rev Professor W Gordon Campbell

My role as a Senior Research Fellow in New Testament is an honorary one, following my retirement as Professor of New Testament Studies at Union, in August 2024. I am grateful that this allows me to remain active in research and publication while playing a small part in College life and contributing to teaching or supervision, at Faculty’s discretion. I also remain an associate professor of Faculté Jean Calvin (John Calvin Seminary), in Aix-en-Provence, France.

My publications reflect my main areas of interest and reveal several motivations:

·         a respect for the integrity and coherence of texts of Holy Scripture and a regard for the responsibility of the reader in engaging with them;

·         a concern for how communities of faith read Scripture;

·         a focus on how each New Testament text contributes to larger corpora – like the four Gospels or Paul’s Letters – and to the biblical Canon as a whole;

·         an attentiveness to ways that the Bible has impacted, and still influences, culture or life in society;

·         a special engagement with the Book of Revelation.

My wife, Sandra, is a retired school-teacher. We are members of Saintfield Road congregation, where I am an elder. We live in Bangor. As none of our four children (Aimée, Myriam, Stuart and Marc) or three grandchildren (Anna, Caleb and Arya) now lives in N. Ireland, skyping and travelling are among our favourite activities.

Research & Supervision

I conduct my research in the service of the Church and in dialogue with the Academy. For me, principled interpretation of each New Testament text involves careful methodological triangulation of three entities: author (with their context and intentions), text (with its value and inviolability) and reader (with their responsiveness and responsibility). I also approach the New Testament witness as a canonical whole and I value the demanding biblical-theological task of demonstrating both its diversity and unity. I am therefore equally comfortable with exegetical-theological research projects that zoom in on one passage or those that zoom out for a larger theological theme.

Whilst I am prepared to consider supervising research topics across all of New Testament literature, I offer the following by way of orientation:

The Book of Revelation. Revelation is my chief area of research output and expertise and I am fundamentally committed to reading the book as a multi-faceted organic whole. I particularly invite research projects that aim to explore motifs, topics or grand themes which contribute towards Revelation’s complex internal cohesion. I am also open to proposals that seek to investigate Revelation’s many and varied ecclesial, cultural and social impacts.

The Gospels and Acts. I read the New Testament’s other narrative texts, too, as coherent compositions. I welcome research proposals which focus either on commonalities that may be discernible across Matthew, Mark, Luke-Acts and John, or on one or more distinctives that may characterise each Evangelist’s particular portrayal of Jesus and (in Acts) of the movement born out of his ministry.

The NT Epistles. Diversity of context, content and thrust characterises both Paul’s individual Letters and the General Epistles and my own forays into these components of New Testament literature are something of a miscellany! I especially welcome research projects with potential to enhance our appreciation of each text’s distinctive voice or of its particular contribution to the polyphony of apostolic teaching.