George B. Caird
(1917- 1984)

Oxford Professor of N.T. Wright

" All, or almost all, of the language used by the Bible to refer to God is metaphor. "

The Gospel of St. Luke (1963) | Jesus and the Jewish Nation (1965)  | The Language and Imagery of the Bible (1980) | New Testament Theology (1994) | Revelation of John (1966)

(On The Significance of A.D.70)
"Jesus was called by God to be the agent of his purpose, and he himself had been sent to bring about that reformation without which Israel could not fulfill her national destiny.  If the nation, so far from accepting that calling, rejected God's messenger and persecuted those who responded to his preaching, how could the assertion of God's sovereignty fail to include an open demonstration that Jesus was right and the nation was wrong?  How could it fail to include the vindication of the persecuted and the cause they lived and died for?" (Jesus and the Jewish Nation, 20f.)

(On Mark 13:5-37 and the "Son of Man")
"Here, as in the book of Daniel, the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven was never conceived as a primitive form of space travel, but as a symbol for a mighty reversal of fortunes within history and at the national level.  How odd of Mark, say the critics, to append to a question about a historical crisis a discourse which is an answer to a question about an eschatological crisis!   But supposing Mark was right!  Supposing the prediction of the coming of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven really was an answer to the disciples' question about the date of the fall of Jerusalem!  It is indeed credible that Jesus, the heir to the linguistic and theological riches of the prophets, and himself a greater theologian and master of imagery than them all, should ever have turned their symbols into flat and literal prose?" (Jesus and the Jewish Nation, 20-22)

(On Mark 13:14-19)
"more useful to a refugee from military invasion than to a man caught unawares by the last trumpet." (Jesus and the Jewish Nation, 21)

(On Revelation 6:16-17)
“Luke records a saying of Jesus, in which he quotes Hosea x. 8, applying the words not to some ultimate cosmic catastrophe but to the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman armies (Luke xxiii. 28-31)." (The Revelation of St. John, p. 90)

(On The Significance of Gospel Events)
"not only in theological truth but in historic fact, the one bore the sins of the many, confident that in him the whole Jewish nation was being nailed to the cross, only to come to life again in a better resurrection." (Jesus and the Jewish Nation, 22)

"the disciples were not evangelistic preachers sent out to save individual souls for some unearthly paradise.  They were couriers proclaiming a national emergency and conducting a referendum on a question of national survival." (New Testament Theology, 361)

(On Symbolism/Allegory)
"The first readers were almost certainly well versed in the sort of symbolic language and imagery in which the book is written. Whether they had formerly been Jews or pagans, they would read the language of myth as fluently as any modern reader of the daily papers reads the conventional symbols of a political cartoon. Much of this language we can reconstruct for ourselves from the Old Testament and Jewish apocalyptic writings on the one hand and from Greek and Roman literature, inscriptions, and coinage on the other (Black's New Testament Commentaries, "A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine," 2nd edition, p. 6)." 

"Our difficulties begin when we try to decide how far to take this picture language literally and how far to take it figuratively. When John echoes the Roman legend that the dead Nero was about to return, how literally does he mean it? Does he believe that Nero was not in fact dead, or that he would be resurrected, or that another paranoiac would come to fill his empty shoes? (Black's New Testament Commentaries, "A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine," 2nd edition. p. 7)."

"Misleading to say that in Revelation the monster is Rome, and still more misleading to say that it is ruler worship. The monster is both an older and a newer phenomenon than Caesar, and the great city is more ancient and more modern than Rome" (Black's New Testament Commentaries, "A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine," 2nd edition, p. xii)." 

"John uses his allusions not as a code in which each symbol requires separate and exact translation, but rather for their evocative and emotive power. This is not photographic art. His aim is to set the echoes of memory and association ringing (Black's New Testament Commentaries, "A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine," 2nd edition, p. 26)." (Revelation: Book of Cosmic Symbols)

WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID

(On Relations with the Roman Catholic Church) 
"Soon after Swansea, Dr Douglas Horton completed his four-volume "Vatican Diary", one of the most detailed and lively records of the second Vatican council. This rounded off. the unique service which Dr Horton rendered as principal ICC observer at Vatican II. The Swansea assembly had received from Dr George B Caird his first impressions of the Vatican Council as another of our observers. The address which he then gave, subsequently amplified in his Congregational Lectures, has since been published by the Oxford University Press. Dr Caird has played a significant role in the exploratory talks between WARC and the secretariat for promoting Christian unity of the Roman Catholic Church; in the official Reformed-Roman Catholic dialogue to which both the Vatican and the Beirut joint WARC/ICC executive committee agreed, Dr Caird is a permanent member of the Alliance delegation. At the first of a series of five meetings, held in Rome last April, he presented a study paper on "The relation between Christ and the church in the New Testament". The ICC are profoundly grateful to Dr Caird for his invaluable contribution to these conversations, as well as for the wise counsel he has given our Council in all matters related to Roman Catholicism." (ICCM)