Professor David Horrell
Professor of New Testament Studies. Director, Centre for Biblical Studies
MA PhD (Cantab)
Extension: 4288
Telephone: 01392 724288
David Horrell came to the Department in 1995 to teach New Testament studies after completing his PhD at Cambridge on Paul's Corinthian letters and the letter known as 1 Clement. His recent books include a co-edited collection assessing the developments in the social-scientific study of the Pauline churches since Wayne Meeks's The Furst Urban Christians, and a number of books on the subject of ecological hermeneutics, outputs from a collaborative project on "Uses of the Bible in Environmental Ethics". He has just completed a volume of essays on 1 Peter and the making of Christian identity. He was the editor of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament from 2002-2007. He is an active member of the British New Testament Society, having chaired the Social World of the New Testament Seminar from 2001-2006; he is also a member of the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL), of the steering group for the SBL Pauline Epistles Section, and of Society for New Testament Studies (SNTS).
His current research interests are:
- 1 Peter and the making of Christian identity
- the uses of the Bible in environmental ethics
- Pauline ethics
His interest in 1 Peter goes back to the writing of the Epworth commentary on 1-2 Peter and Jude, published in 1998. In recent years he has published a number of essays on 1 Peter, particularly developing a social-scientific or postcolonial perspective on the development of Christian identity in the letter. He is in the early stages of preparing the International Critical Commentary on 1 Peter.
His work on uses of the Bible in environmental ethics was as director of a collaborative research project on this topic, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK. During 2011-2012 he is working on a project funded by the St Luke's College Foundation to develop resources for school teachers on the Bible and environmental ethics.
His major work on Pauline ethics, Solidarity and Difference: Towards a Contemporary Reading of Paul's Ethics, was published in 2005. As part of the project on uses of the Bible in environmental ethics, he has written, along with Dr Cherryl Hunt and Dr Christopher Southgate, a book on the ecological ethical potential of Pauline texts, Greeing Paul: Rereading the Apostle in an Age of Ecological Crisis, published by Baylor University Press in 2010.
He teaches modules on a wide range of New Testament topics, including Paul and contemporary Pauline studies, New Testament ethics, 1 Peter, New Testament Greek, and the Bible and environmental ethics.
