Charles Harold Dodd CH FBA (April 7, 1884 – September 21, 1973) was a Welsh scholar of the New Testament and a significant Protestant theologian. He is recognized for advocating “realized eschatology,” the idea that Jesus’ mentions of the kingdom of God signify a current reality instead of a future cataclysm. Dodd was influenced by the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Otto.
Dodd arrived in the world on April 7, 1884, in Wrexham, a town in Denbighshire, Wales. He was the older sibling of historian A. H. Dodd, classicist P. W. Dodd, and educator E. E. Dodd. He pursued classical studies at University College, Oxford, beginning in 1902. Following his graduation in 1906, he spent a year in Berlin, learning from the prominent Adolf von Harnack.
He pursued his studies for the ministry at Mansfield College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1912. He served as a Congregationalist minister in Warwick for three years before shifting to academia. Starting in 1915, he held the position of Yates Lecturer in New Testament at Oxford. In 1930, he became the Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the Victoria University of Manchester. From 1935, he was the Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and became emeritus in 1949. Among his Cambridge students were David Daube and W. D. Davies. Together, they contributed to significant changes in New Testament studies, which eventually led to the New Perspective on Paul and the scholarly work of Davies’s student, E. P. Sanders. He oversaw the New English Bible translators’ efforts starting in 1950. He was elected as a fellow of the British Academy in 1946 and was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1961.
Dodd passed away on September 21, 1973, in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. His daughter Rachel wed the Old Testament scholar Eric William Heaton in 1951.
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