William Barclay was one of the most effective communicators of the Gospel in the 20th Century. A classics and Greek scholar, he wrote about the New Testament with amazing clarity. While he was a theological liberal his work is used by persons of various theological positions.

Barclay's prolific writings began as a serendipity. The person writing curriculum for the Church of Scotland became ill. Professor Barclay was asked to serve as a substitute writer. The end result was his 17-volume Daily Study Bible, which has sold well over two million copies in English alone. Recently it has been translated into Russian and several other languages.

The Scottish New Testament scholar went on to write 60 books (three books a year) and a column in the British Weekly. He was also the most popular television broadcaster on the BBC. In the 1960s if you had stopped a man on the street in Scotland and asked whom he knew in the Kirk he would likely have replied, "Aye, Willie Barclay!"

Barclay was a charming person. He was generous to a fault and jovial. He enjoyed a joke, especially when it was at his own expense. He laughed heartily when I told him about an American graduate student who remarked, "William Barclay, the only man in the world without an unpublished thought." He was such a rapid lecturer that a student dared not drop his pen in class. A deaf musician, he led the theological college choir.

A devoted family man, Barclay and his wife Katherine lost their twenty-one year old daughter Barbara in a boating accident in the Irish Sea. One of the professor's critics wrote from Northern Ireland that God took Barbara to save her from her father's heresies. This hurt him very much. Several years later he said, "Whatever you make of Jesus stilling the storm on the Sea of Galilee, he stills the storms in our hearts." He and Katherine adopted a girl when the couple were in their 50s. They also had a son, Ronnie. Barclay said that Katherine never read one of his books.

He was a portly man during the 1960s and 1970s and a cigarette chain smoker. His hobby was railroads. The writer/professor's great assets were his photographic memory and self-discipline. His statement in his autobiography that he had a "second class mind" and had never had an original thought was shocking. He told me that none of his books would outlive him. How wrong he was on that prediction!

What Barclay meant when he claimed to have a second class mind was that he was not an original scholar but rather a popularizer of New Testament studies. His only scholarly work was a book on ancient Near Eastern educational practices. He had a great grasp of Greek and Biblical backgrounds, as evidenced in his commentaries.

One evening while visiting in the Barclay home (as one of seven of his American students), I asked Mrs. Barclay about his exceptional ability to recall material. She said that when he was working on the translation of the New English Bible with C. H. Dodd, he would call her from Oxford with instructions such as these: "Go to the south wall of my study to the second tier of books on your left; on the third shelf from the floor you will find a green book with this title; look at the footnote on page 127.1 want to verify it." She said that he did this sort of thing frequently. Mrs. Barclay was amazed that we American students had come all that way to study with "my Bill."