Richard
I. Pervo (1942 – 2017)
Richard Ivan Pervo was born on May 11, 1942 and died on May 20, 2017. The
cause of his death was an acute episode of chronic leukemia, a condition he had
lived with for over seven years. His most recent teaching appointment was
Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the
University of Minnesota—a position he held from 1999 until 2002. He
specialized in New Testament and Christian Studies. The quintessential scholar,
an Episcopal priest (until 2003), and religious educator, Pervo is best known for
his pioneering views on the Acts of the Apostles. His death reverberates across
all continents.
Born in Lakewood, Ohio to Ivan Alexander and Elizabeth ‘Betty’ (Kline)
Pervo, he went to grade school and high school (kindergarten through 11th
grade) in Fairview Park, Ohio. In 12th grade, he attended the six-year Concordia
College program in Milwaukee where he received his high school diploma after
one year and a finishing diploma in 1962. He accepted his B.A. from Concordia
Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1964. After a short stint in social work
and community organizing (St. Louis), Pervo earned a Master’s of Divinity at the
Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned his
Th.D. from Harvard University under Dieter Georgi in 1979. Helmut Koester,
George MacRae and John Strugnell served on Pervo’s dissertation committee. A
revised version of his dissertation appeared as Profit with Delight: Literary Genre
of the Acts of the Apostles (Fortress, 1987).
From 1971-1975, Pervo taught Greek at EDS while working on his
doctorate. In 1975, he was appointed Assistant Professor at Seabury-Western
Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. In 1979, he was promoted to Associate
Professor at Seabury-Western and in 1989, to Full Professor. Pervo taught at
Seabury-Western until 1999. He also served as Treasurer to the Board of
Directors for the Anglican Theological Review in Evanston, Illinois from 1984-
1989. At the time of his death, he was a member in good standing of the Society
of Biblical Literature, the North American Patristics Society, Studiorum Novi
Testamenti Societas, the Midwest Patristics Seminar, and the Chicago Society of
Biblical Research.
Throughout his career, Pervo enjoyed a reputation as a superb teacher,
amiable faculty member, and popular lecturer. He published books, articles, and
reviews on countless topics in major North American and European journals. His
interactions with other scholars were generous to a fault. Even his most scathing
book reviews leave a generally laudatory impression. He dedicated the bulk of
his career to understanding the Acts of the Apostles and related literature. In
addition to Profit with Delight, he contributed four seminal scholarly works:
Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Polebridge, 2006), Acts:
A Commentary (Hermeneia, 2008), The Making of Paul: Constructions of the
Apostle in Early Christianity (Fortress, 2010), and The Acts of Paul: A New
Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Cascade, 2014). In the course of
his research, he came to regard the Acts of the Apostles as comparable to ancient
fiction. The various episodes about Peter, Paul, and the other apostles were
composed, he argued, with an eye to entertaining (“delight”) as they evangelized
(“profit”). In addition to a new vision of the genre of Acts (i.e., “fiction” rather
than “history,” although he rejected the categories for other than heuristic
purposes), he also shifted scholarly consensus of the date of Acts (to half a
century later, ca. 115 CE) and argued for the author’s reliance on an early corpus
of Paul’s letters, despite obvious discrepancies between these two data sets. He
was thinking critically right up until his death. His most recent article entitled,
“When in Rome: The Authorship of Acts in the Late Second Century”—appearing
in the month that he died—argues that Irenaeus may have invented Acts’s
attribution to “Luke.” With this contribution, Pervo cast doubt, for the first time
in his career, on the long-held thesis of Henry Joel Cadbury and others that the
author of the Third Gospel wrote Acts (Biblical Research [2015]: 15-32; n.b.,
issue was published May 2017 despite 2015 publication date). An additional
manuscript on Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians was one month away
from completion when he died.
Pervo’s extensive knowledge of ancient history and ancient languages,
combined with his keen sensitivity to human nature, made him an exegete of
Christian literature par excellence. Beyond pioneering theses about the
authorship, date, provenance, genre, sources, and purpose of various New
Testament and early Christian writings, Pervo was known for playfully
provoking the guild with an Anglophilic wit that was often too highbrow for even
the most sophisticated to parse. Richard’s rule of thumb seemed to be: a little
something to offend everyone. As the ‘Robin Williams’ of New Testament studies,
Pervo was a stiff ivory-tower intellectual who loved a good joke as much as a dry
cocktail and possessed conceit in inverse relationship to his I.Q. That said, each
spoonful of sugar was intended to help audiences swallow his squarely rational,
frequently anti-dogmatic arguments. A few weeks before his death, on the
occasion of a new contract to write a commentary on the Epistle of Barnabas,
Richard conveyed his congratulations to me with a single droll quip: “Splendid!
So pleased (although this means reading Barnabas).” In the first email Richard
ever sent me the subject line read: “R.I.P.,” the way he often signed his name.
Ironically, I like to imagine him not ‘resting in peace,’ but cavorting with the
saints in heaven until everyone’s sides ache.
A Festschrift volume in his honor is scheduled to appear this Fall with the
title: Delightful Acts: New Essays on the Canonical and Non-Canonical Acts, ed. H.
W. Attridge, D. R. MacDonald, C. K. Rothschild, WUNT (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2017). Pervo was aware of the volume, which contains a comprehensive
bibliography he himself compiled only a month or so before his death. He is
deeply missed by those who remember him affectionately as colleague, mentor,
and friend.
Richard I. Pervo is survived by his wife, Karen E. Moreland (married April
2, 1967), his twin brother, Charles Alexander Pervo and his sister, Pamela Pervo
Clifton. His wife will be present at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting in
Boston on November 19th from 9:00-11:30 A.M. to receive the Festschrift volume.
A funeral mass is scheduled to take place on July 6th at 10:00 A.M. at St. Mark’s
Cathedral in Minneapolis (https://www.ourcathedral.org/). His widow requests
your R.S.V.P. to the following email address:
[email protected].
Clare K. Rothschild, Professor of Scripture Studies, Lewis University (Chicago, IL)
and Professor Extraordinary, Department Ancient Studies, Faculty of Arts &
Social Sciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. See more at:
https://www.sbl-site.org/
