Terence Donaldson

Professor Emeritus, New Testament

After completing his doctorate in 1982 (at Wycliffe), Terry Donaldson taught for seventeen years in Saskatoon at the College of Emmanuel and St. Chad, the Anglican seminary on the campus of the University of Saskatchewan. In 1999, he returned to Wycliffe where he taught full-time until 2016, when he began an active retirement. His teaching and research interests include Matthew; Paul; hermeneutics; Second Temple Judaism; Gentilization of early Christianity, and early Christian-Jewish relations. As well as books, he has published about forty journal articles or chapters, and many reviews. His current research project has to do with ethnicity, identity and the emergence of Gentile Christianity. As a scholar, he is fascinated with the process by which the early church, from its beginnings as an eschatological renewal movement entirely within the Jewish environment, developed within a century or so into a largely Gentile religion, separate and distinct from the synagogue. As a Christian educator and layperson, he is concerned to lead students (and others) to a richer appreciation of the gospel that stands at the heart and center both of the Bible and of the grand and richly diverse tradition of the church. Outside work Terry enjoys banjo-playing, ballroom dancing, bread-baking, camping, and cycling. He and his wife, Lois, live in downtown Toronto and are members of St Aidan’s parish. They have two adult children, two children-in-law and three grandchildren.

* Note to potential PhD students: Dr. Donaldson no longer takes any new PhD students.

• “Gentiles.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• “Supersessionism and Early Christian Self-definition.” Journal of the Jesus Movement in its Jewish Setting 3 (2016), 1-32
• Jews and Anti-Judaism in the New Testament: Decision Points and Divergent Interpretations (London: SPCK; Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010)
• Judaism and the Gentiles: Jewish Patterns of Universalism (to 135 CE) (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007)
• Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997)
• “ ‘Gentile Christianity’ as a Category in the Study of Christian Origins,” in Harvard Theological Review 106 (2013), 433-458
• “ ‘We Gentiles’: Ethnicity and Identity in Justin’s Dialogue,” in Early Christianity 4 (2013), 216-41.
• “What I Learned Teaching NT 101,” in Toronto Journal of Theology 16 (2000), 251-65.
• “The Juridical, the Participatory and the ‘New Perspective’ on Paul,” pp. 229-41, in Kathy Ehrensperger and J. Brian Tucker, eds., Reading Paul in Context: Explorations in Identity Formation (Library of New Testament Studies; London: T. &. T Clark, 2010).
• “Introduction to the Pauline Corpus,” in John Barton and John Muddiman, eds., The Oxford Bible Commentary: The Pauline Epistles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 27-56.