Dodd, Charles Harold

(1884–1973)

   Theologian.

   Dodd was educated at the University of Oxford. Subsequently he taught New Testament studies first at Oxford, then at Manchester and finally at Cambridge. He was the author of several important books including the Parables of the Kingdom, The Apostolic Preaching and its Development and works on the Epistle to the Romans and the Johannine literature. He believed that Jesus taught a ‘realised eschatology’ (that the Kingdom of God was in the here and now), that the original teachings of the Apostles could be isolated (the ‘kerygma’) and that St paul’s teaching on the Wrath of God implied that an impersonal process of retribution was built into the structure of the universe. These ideas were highly influential and Dodd is remembered as the most important British New Testament scholar of his generation.

   W.D. Davies and D. Daube (eds), The Background of the New Testament and its Eschatology: Essays in honour of C.H. Dodd (1956);

   P.E. Hughes (ed.), Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology (1966).