DODD, CHARLES HAROLD

New Testament scholar; b. Wrexham, Wales, April 7, 1884; d. Goring, England, Sept. 22, 1973. After receiving a B.A. from University College, Oxford, in 1906 and then studying at Berlin, Dodd pursued theological studies at Mansfield College, Oxford, from 1908 to 1911 and was ordained as a Congregational minister in 1912. He served as pastor of Warwick Congregational Church until 1915, when he was appointed New Testament lecturer, later professor, at Mansfield. In 1930 he became Rylands Professor at Manchester and in 1935 the first non-Anglican Norris Hulse Professor at Cambridge, holding the post until 1949.

The author of numerous scholarly works, he was particularly known for the concept of "realized eschatology" set forth in Parables of the Kingdom (1935) and History and the Gospel (1938). This theory emphasized the presence of the kingdom of God in the ministry of Christ and placed less emphasis on eschatology as having to do with future events. Dodd was also known for his theory of the New Testament kerygma (proclamation, preaching) set forth in The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (1936). Another area of special interest for him was the Gospel of John, treated in Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953) and Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (1963). In 1950 he was appointed director of the ecumenical group of scholars that produced the translation of the Bible published in 1970 as the New English Bible (NT 1961). A participant in the ecumenical movement, Dodd addressed the 1948 founding assembly of the World Council of Churches on the biblical basis for Christian unity.

Bibliography: w. d. davies and d. daube, eds., The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology: In Honour of C. H. Dodd (Cambridge 1956) contains a bibliography of Dodd's writings.

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