Philip Maurice Casey was a British scholar of New Testament and early Christianity.
17 Facts About Maurice Casey
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Maurice Casey was an emeritus professor at the University of Nottingham, having served there as Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the Department of Theology.
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Maurice Casey's father was the Anglican vicar of Wheatley Hill, but after his death his mother moved to Chevington and Casey to boarding school at Woodbridge School, Suffolk.
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Maurice Casey entered St Chad's College, Durham University having intended to become an Anglican priest, but changed his views in 1962 while completing his undergraduate degree in theology.
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Maurice Casey then taught classics at Spalding High School, an all-girls grammar school, from 1967 to 1971.
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Maurice Casey returned to Durham University to study for a Doctor of Philosophy degree in divinity, at first intending to study the historical figure of Jesus.
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Maurice Casey's PhD was awarded in 1977 for a doctoral thesis titled "The interpretation of Daniel VII in Jewish and patristic literature and in the New Testament: an approach to the Son of Man problem".
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Maurice Casey delivered the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in 1985.
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Maurice Casey retired in 2006, and was made professor emeritus.
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Maurice Casey died in Nottingham on 10 May 2014, at the age of 71.
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Maurice Casey's work argued strongly for Aramaic sources behind the New Testament documents, specifically for Q and the Gospel of Mark.
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Maurice Casey contributed works on early Christology and the use of the term Son of Man within the New Testament Gospels in reference to Jesus.
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Maurice Casey described himself as an independent scholar, who did not serve the interests of any religious faith or anti-religious group.
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Maurice Casey believed that Jesus really existed, but did not believe in his divinity.
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Maurice Casey criticized Christian fundamentalists who accept incredible miracles, Christian churches that refuse to grasp the Jewishness of Jesus, mythicists who reject everything about Jesus, and even some liberal scholars, such as the Jesus Seminar, who viewed Jesus as a kind of cynical philosopher, and gave credence to the earliest apocryphal writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter.
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Maurice Casey believed that the documents on Jesus of greatest historical value are the Gospel of Mark and the Pauline epistles.
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Maurice Casey has criticized Pope Benedict XVI for his books about Jesus, accusing the pontiff of using sources that are, in his views, unreliable, like the Gospel of John.