The Conversion of a Classicist: Why reading a Greek New Testament led James Orr to Christ

James Orr and I both attended the same college at Oxford University in the late 1990s. I was already a Christian when I arrived as an undergraduate, but James was not. His public school education had involved attending chapel, but it hadn’t had much effect on him—he was fairly agnostic towards Christianity.

James and I didn’t know each other as students (he was a year above me), but we’ve got to know each other in the years since— although James now has a much more impressive title than I will ever aspire to: Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University.

How did someone with minimal interest in faith end up becoming a philosopher of religion at one of the world’s most prestigious universities? It turns out that, soon after graduating, James experienced a dramatic conversion which had begun after encountering Jesus in the pages of the Bible while he was still a student. You can hear James’ story in full on Episode 16 of The Surprising Rebirth Of Belief In God podcast.

A lighting bolt from the Bible

At school James had studied Greek and Latin. He was almost fluent in reading Greek by the time he arrived at university for a degree in classics. Up to that point, James says he had only read the ancient works of the great playwrights and philosophers that were part of his reading list. But one day, a Christian friend gave James the New Testament in its original language—Koine Greek.

James says he vividly remembers the thrill of being able to read the Gospels in their original language. Of course, he had frequently heard English translations of the Bible being read in public before but had never really thought about it as a historical book.

James describes a “lightning bolt” moment, saying, “I became aware that this text was anchored in history. If you asked, ‘Where did I think it had come from?’ I don’t know. But somehow up to that point it had occupied a part of my imagination that was siloed off from the warp and woof of everyday life and the concrete processes of history.”

As James started to read the Gospels for himself in Greek, he realized these accounts were written to be understood as real historical records just as much as any of the histories and annals he was familiar with from Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plutarch. James was also impressed by how well preserved these texts were compared to most of the ancient literature he was familiar with. Most significantly, the life of Jesus also suddenly came to life in a new way.

Cumulative Coincidences

James Orr, having become intrigued as an undergraduate by the discovery of a real, historical Jesus of Nazareth, went on to test whether the Christ of history may also be the Christ of today.

Having graduated and embarked upon a promising career in law, James was nevertheless asking himself existential questions about the purpose of his life. On New Year’s Eve 2002 he prayed a skeptical (and, he admits, fairly drunken) prayer, asking God, if he was there, to reveal himself. Remarkably, from the very next morning and over the following two months, James says he experienced a number of very specific and unusual answers to his prayers. “It got to the point where it was becoming irrational of me to deny the cumulative weight of these coincidences.”

These signs stopped almost as suddenly as they had begun but led to James investigating the evidence for Christianity with renewed vigor, devouring scholarly books alongside Bible reading. At this point he was not connected to a church community and knew no committed Christians, yet his lifestyle began to change dramatically. Any desire for smoking and drinking evaporated. People around him noticed the difference. His sudden change in behavior was “unsettling” to his family and friends.

Becoming a Christian

Yet something had ignited inside James. The Jesus of history who had consumed his intellectual interest now began to come into focus as the same God who was leading him inexorably towards the Christian faith. James eventually became part of a church community, where he found others who had made similar journeys. They seemed to him to be “the real deal.” “There was something self-authenticatingly true about this community,” he says.

Through a further series of providential circumstances, James eventually felt called to leave his law career and begin a postgraduate degree in philosophy of religion at Cambridge. Ironically, the rise of New Atheism at that time also fuelled his change in career. “I was amazed at the weakness of their arguments,” he recalls.

Today James continues in his role as a member of the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge.

Perhaps we may yet see more surprising stories like that of James Orr, the classicist who was surprised to find Jesus stepping out of the pages of history into his own life.

The stories of James Orr and countless others demonstrate that the Bible cannot be picked up, admired, and then merely set aside. History itself hinges on the reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Somehow, in him, all the hopes, dreams and fears of humankind once found their meeting place and continue to do so today. That, after all, is the radical claim at the centre of the whole story. 

Listen to the full story of James in EP 16 of the Surprising Rebirth podcast ‘Did The Resurrection Really Happen?’

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