John Vivian Mortland Sturdy (27 October 1933 – 6 July 1996) was an English clergyman and academic. He was Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Sturdy studied at Christ Church, Oxford.[1] He married Jill Evans in 1961, and they had twelve children including nine adoptions.[2]

Sturdy was executive editor of The Cambridge History of Judaism.[3] He wrote the commentary on the Book of Numbers for The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible; a review in the Scottish Journal of Theology suggested that he maintained "a good balance between being informative and being gently critical of some of the values expressed in the text."[4]

Sturdy was working on a book on the dating of the New Testament when he died. This was a response to J. A. T. Robinson's 1976 book Redating the New Testament. Sturdy argued that the books of the New Testament were written later than the scholarly consensus believed.[5] Sturdy's unfinished work was later published as Redrawing the Boundaries: The Date of Early Christian Literature (2007).

He died of heart failure on 6 July 1996.[6]

Sturdy was a coin collector, and after his death his widow donated 1,751 twentieth-century world coins from his collection to the Fitzwilliam Museum.[7]

References

  1. ^ "Obituaries". Oxford University Gazette. No. 4417. 14 November 1996. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  2. ^ "Mrs Jill Sturdy 1935-1998". Wotton House. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  3. ^ Horbury, William (1999). "Preface". The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 3. Cambridge University Press. p. xvi. ISBN 9780521243773. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  4. ^ Carroll, R. P. (1977). "Numbers". Scottish Journal of Theology. 31 (1): 91. doi:10.1017/S003693060001317X. S2CID 170539116. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  5. ^ Bernier, Jonathan (2016). The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity: Toward a Critical Realist Philosophy of History in Jesus Studies. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 43. ISBN 9780567662873. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  6. ^ "Sancton Wood School". Wotton House. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  7. ^ "2 lati: CM.1319-1997". Fitzwilliam Museum. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
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