Pervo was born in Lakewood, Ohio, the son of Ivan Pervo and Elizabeth Kline. He married Karen E. Moreland on April 2, 1967.[9]
Pervo received his undergraduate degree from Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1964. He received a Bachelor of Divinity at the Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and earned his Th.D. from Harvard University in 1979.[9] A revised version of his dissertation was published in 1987 as Profit with Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles.[10]
In February 2001, Pervo was arrested after investigators found thousands of images of child pornography on his work computer at the University of Minnesota.[12] In May he pleaded guilty to five counts of possession and one count of distribution of child pornography. He was sentenced to one year in a state workhouse and eight years probation.[13][14] He formally resigned from the University of Minnesota as of June 2001, having been suspended since his arrest.[15] After serving his sentence he continued to publish theological works as an independent scholar and Fellow of the Westar Institute,[2] and was recognized as an authority on the canonical and non-canonical books of Acts.[16]
^Spencer, F. Scott (1 April 2008). "Book Review: Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists". Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology. 62 (2): 190–193. doi:10.1177/002096430806200212.
^Attridge, Harold W.; MacDonald, Dennis R.; Rothschild, Clare K., eds. (2017). Delightful Acts: New Essays on Canonical and Non-canonical Acts. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. ISBN9783161544774.
^Foster, Paul (1 August 2015). "Book Review: The Acts of Paul: Richard I. Pervo, The Acts of Paul: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary". The Expository Times. 126 (11): 564. doi:10.1177/0014524615579982p. ISSN0014-5246. S2CID171952387.