Norman Porteous

Born: 9 September, 1898, in Haddington, East Lothian

Died: 3 September, 2003, in Edinburgh, aged 104

PROFESSOR Norman Porteous was Edinburgh University’s senior professor emeritus; he may also have been its oldest graduate, as well as the last surviving British Army officer of the First World War.

He received his schooling in Haddington, where his father was the rector of the Knox Memorial Institute, and it was his father who introduced him to Greek, which was not then part of the syllabus. He entered the University of Edinburgh as first bursar in 1916, but his studies were interrupted by war service in France (1917-19), where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 13th Royal Scots.

On resuming his scholarly career, he gained first-class degrees in Classics from the University of Edinburgh (1922) and Litterae Humaniores from Trinity, Oxford (1924). Returning to Edinburgh, he completed his studies in Divinity with distinction in Old Testament Studies (1928) at New College, then one of the three colleges of the United Free Church of Scotland. He was awarded its Senior Cunningham Fellowship in 1927, and this financed his studies at the universities of Berlin, Tbingen and Mnster during the years 1927 to 1929.

In 1929, the year of the union of the UF Church with the Church of Scotland, he became minister of the formerly UF congregation in the mining village of Crossgates, in Fife. Although he was there only two years, his work in that parish was quite as formative of his essential humanity as his period in the trenches a dozen years earlier. On 2 September of that year, he married May Hadwen Robertson; they were to have three sons and three daughters.

In 1931, he accepted a call to the Regius Chair of Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University of St Andrews. Given the progression of his studies from the classical languages and literature to Hebrew and biblical studies, this hardly occasions surprise. However, his interests in Systematic Theology were quite as strong. He had been taught in Edinburgh by the great HR Macintosh and, when in Mnster, he was the first English-speaking student in Karl Barth’s Dogmatics classroom. In his own recollection, it was simply a matter of whether he would first be called to a chair in Hebrew or to one in Theology.

On the retirement in 1934 of Adam Welch, his beloved professor at New College, he was called to succeed him in the chair of Old Testament Language, Literature and Theology. The incorporation of the New College chairs into the Faculty of Divinity of Edinburgh University, following the union of churches in 1929, had to await an act of parliament in 1935, and Porteous delayed his transfer from St Andrews until those formalities were complete - St Andrews was to confer an honorary Doctorate of Divinity on him in 1944.

The New College building was not yet ready to house the whole united faculty, and he taught for two years in Old College alongside Professor ARS Kennedy, his first Hebrew mentor during his days as a Classics student. The move to New College followed in 1937 just before the retirement of Kennedy, then 78. Porteous was appointed his successor, and held the ancient chair of Hebrew and Semitic Languages until his retirement in 1968.

Like Kennedy and Welch, he would hold the presidency of the (British) Society for Old Testament Study (1954), among other distinctions. But neither of these predecessors was in addition Dean of the Faculty or Principal of New College. He held these offices together from 1964 until 1968, further symbolising the union of the two separate institutions in which he had learned his Hebrew and Old Testament.

Porteous was a member for 21 years of the panel of translators responsible for the New English Bible, a project that had its origins in the 1946 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

He read a paper at the 1950 Leiden conference in the Netherlands, at which the International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament and the journal Vetus Testamentum were launched, in part to try to heal war-time wounds. Connections with German-speaking scholarship were very important to him. In 1935, he was a junior member of a 14-strong party from the Society for Old Testament Study who travelled to Gttingen in response to an appeal by German colleagues for consultations about the growing crisis in their land. It was on the train journey there that he met Aubrey Johnson (later a professor in Cardiff), who was to become his closest friend and colleague.

In 1936, he was invited to contribute to a volume marking Karl Barth’s 50th birthday. Further essays by him would appear in subsequent festschriften for Barth, and also for the two leading Old Testament theologians, Walther Eichrodt (1970) and Gerhard von Rad (1971). It was his pre-Second World War friendship with Professor Artur Weiser of Tbingen which led to the post-war establishment of the Edinburgh-Tbingen exchange, prized by generations of Divinity students.

Porteous did not regularly teach Old Testament Theology. He inherited a division of labour worked out by Kennedy and Welch that the Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages was responsible for the first-year class, and the Professor of Old Testament Language, Literature, and Theology for the second. For most of his career, he taught Introduction to the Old Testament alongside first-year Hebrew. Two of his students, WD McHardy and James Barr, would later hold the Regius chair of Hebrew in Oxford.

While it was his colleagues in the other Edinburgh chair who delivered courses in Old Testament Theology, he remained concerned through much of his career with how properly to frame "Theology of the Old Testament" - hardly a surprise for someone captivated by both Hebrew studies and Systematics. Several of his papers proved to be sketches for his article on that subject published in the New Peake Commentary on the Bible (1962). Two threads run through them all. One is the centrality of what the Old Testament itself calls "knowledge of God", by which it means something quite non-speculative and utterly practical: right behaviour. It is entirely appropriate that he should have chosen Living the Mystery as the title of his collected papers (1967).

The other thread is that Old Testament Theology, or Biblical Theology, is but the handmaid of Systematic Theology or Dogmatics: only by participating in that normative task does the biblical scholar merit the title "biblical theologian". The biblical scholar aids the theologian by pre-sorting the relevant biblical material. That title for his papers was at least doubly significant. He had been invited by the editors of a widely used commentary series, Das Alte Testament Deutsch, to prepare their volume on the book of Daniel. His thoughtful study of that "mysterious" book went through four German editions from 1962 to 1985, with two in English in 1965 and 1979.

Porteous kept a kindly and supportive interest in large numbers of colleagues and students. A great talker, he was a treasure trove of information and fun. It was a delight to see him five years ago, surrounded by several generations of his family, when representatives of his alma mater, led by the principal and vice-chancellor, presented the congratulations of the university on his 100th birthday.

GRAEME AULD