Rev Professor John Cochrane O'Neill,
born 8 December 1930 died 30 March 2003
John O'Neill, who was Professor of New Testament in the University of Edinburgh from 1985 until he retired in 1996, was possibly one of the most loved and certainly one of the most original New Testament scholars working in Britain in the past fifty years.
He was born in Australia and studied history at the University of Melbourne. As a young man he went to hear George MacLeod preach in Melbourne and on the strength of MacLeod's sermon decided that he wanted to become a minister. He trained for the ministry at Ormond College in Melbourne and then went on to postgraduate study at the Universities of Gottingen and Cambridge. At Cambridge, where he gained his PhD, he was a pupil of John Robinson, later to become Bishop of Woolwich, and author, exactly forty years ago of Honest to God.
O'Neill was in many ways the mirror image of his teacher. Robinson was a very conservative New Testament scholar who reached extremely radical conclusions about God, Jesus and the Church. O'Neill was an extremely radical New Testament scholar, who thought a lot of the New Testament was not original, but who reached very conservative conclusions about God, Jesus and the Church. Most New Testament scholars of the past fifty years have come to the conclusion that Jesus preached about the Kingdom of God but never had any intention of founding a church. O'Neill was convinced that Jesus appointed his disciples to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper.
When his research at Cambridge was completed O'Neill returned to Melbourne where he taught until, in 1964 he was appointed professor of New Testament at Westminster College, then the training centre for the ministry of the Presbyterian Church of England. O'Neill taught there for twenty one years. He was regularly to be seen hurrying, in his slightly stooped way, from his house in the college grounds to give a lecture to the students. He was always nearly late for lectures, not because he regarded them as unimportant but because he wanted to give students his views on the latest scholarship, and so right up until the last minute he was revising what he wanted to say He was not someone who repeated lectures year after year. Every one was freshly thought out.
The salary of a teacher at Westminster College was not high, and for a number of years, O'Neill was a highly regarded teacher in Cambridge University's divinity school, a responsibility which he combined with his teaching duties in Westminster College and the job there of college librarian. On one occasion a colleague made a scathing remark about the library,and said that whatever fault he had found with it was due to the librarian spending too much time lecturing in the university divinity faculty. O'Neill immediately gave up lecturing in the divinity school, claiming that if his colleagues believed that it was distracting him from his college duties, he would give them no reason to continue in that conviction.
When he was appointed to succeed Hugh Anderson in the chair of New Testament in Edinburgh, John O'Neill continued to produce stimulating, innovative works of scholarship which very few other scholars agreed with. However those who did not agree with him valued the depth of his scholarship and the originality of his mind, and, most of all the diffidence with which he expressed views which he held deeply. Although he believed he owed to his students the results of his own research he always respected students and scholars who argued cogently against him
Recently, John O'Neill had expressed grave reservations about the way the Church of Scotland selected candidates for the ministry. He thought it was far too secular in its objectives, and valued pragmatic assessment over spiritual potential. He cared passionately about the ministry and was deeply hurt by the way his anxieties about the ministerial selection process were swept aside. He deserved from those responsible a greater hearing than he got.
Two months ago he was told that he had cancer. Although he was a scholar of quite considerable complexity he was a man of very simple faith, and that faith sustained him through increasing weakness and the realisation that he would not have as much time as he originally hoped. So did the discovery from those who heard of his illness and contacted him that he was not only hugely respected but greatly loved. Those of us who could not begin to match his scholarship but valued him as a friend know how deep our loss is.
John O'Neill is survived by his wife, the writer Judith O'Neill and his three daughters, Rachel, Catherine and Philippa.
Published in The Herald.
John O'Neill was once of the most stimulating and controversial New Testament scholars of his day, who challenged most of the assumptions of current scholarship. While most students of the New Testament believe that the gospels of Matthew and Luke are based on Mark, O'Neill argued that this solution to the problem of the relationship of the first three, synoptic gospels was far too simplistic, and that it could not have been Mark's Gospel as we have it that was the basis of Matthew and Luke.
Conventional scholarship assumes that if a document contains even a primitive reference to the doctrine of the Trinity it must belong to the Christian era, but O'Neill was convinced that the idea of the Trinity was alive before Jesus, which allowed for a radical revision of the dating of some of the New Testament documents.
When he turned his attention to the letters attributed to Paul, O'Neill became convinced that Paul wrote some of all of them but not all of any of them. He believed that an original letter of Paul, of about five thousand Greek characters, was to be found in parts throughout the letters which bear Paul's name, which also include long passages of Jewish sayings and attacks on the Jewish law which belong to a century after Paul wrote.
John O'Neill was born in Melbourne and graduated in history from the university there. He studied for the ministry at Ormond Theological College and then undertook research into the Book of Acts with Dr John Robinson, later Bishop of Woolwich at the University of Cambridge. On completion of his PhD he returned to teach at Ormond College until he was appointed Dunn Professor of New Testament at Westminster College, Cambridge, the training centre for ministers of the then Presbyterian Church of England. While his main responsibility was within Westminster College he taught courses ("colloquies" he preferred to call them) in the University Divinity Faculty.
In 1975-6 O'Neill delivered the Cunningham Lectures in the University of Edinburgh in which he developed his thesis that Jesus went to Jerusalem, convinced that his death he would gain from God time for his followers and the people of the city to repent. He took the view that Jesus knew that he was the Son of God, although, being fully human, he also knew that he could be wrong. New Testament scholars have discussed at length why, if Jesus was the Messiah, he was apparently so reticent about claiming that he was. O'Neill was convinced that because it was blasphemy for anyone to claim to be Messiah; Jesus had to rely on others giving the title and role to him.
While most scholars accepted the conventional wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth had been a charismatic preacher of God's reign and kingdom who had no intention of establishing the church, O'Neill, typically, took a contrary view. He believed that Jesus instructed his disciples to preach God's word and administer sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. The disciples, O'Neill believed, fell into two categories: those who chose to follow Jesus in his itinerant and quasi-monastic life, and those who continued to live within society but were committed to Jesus' message.
Very few of O'Neill's views found acceptance within the community of New Testament scholars, but this never deterred him from expressing them with conviction, nor did it stop his colleagues from recognising that however idiosyncratic his views, they were based on deep scholarship and a wide knowledge of the literature not only of the New Testament but of the inter-testamental period immediately before Jesus.
In 1985 he was appointed to the chair of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology in Edinburgh, and became a minister of the Church of Scotland. He was a stimulating teacher who was never afraid to share his own conclusions with students but who never imposed his views on them. He took great pains over his lectures. If he taught a course in two successive years he always revised his lectures to make sure that they reflected his attitude to the most current thinking. He was a scholar who was prepared to change his mind. He took enormous pleasure in any success which came to former students. Colleagues in other disciplines and those who shared with him a passion for the New Testament recognised in John O'Neill a man of considerable intellectual stature and massive personal integrity.
When told a few weeks ago, without any warning, that he was suffering from terminal cancer he reacted with typical courage, calmness, deep faith and concern for those closest to him. He is survived by his wife, the writer Judith O'Neill and his three daughters Rachel, Catherine and Philippa.
Published in The Times.