Philip Francis Esler (born 27 August 1952) is the Portland Chair in New Testament Studies at the University of Gloucestershire. He is an Australian-born higher education administrator and academic who became the inaugural Chief Executive of the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2005, remaining in that role until 2009. From 1995 to 2010 he was Professor of Biblical Criticism at St Andrews University. From 1998 to 2001 he was Vice-Principal for Research and Provost of St Leonard’s College at St Andrews. During the years 1999 to 2003 he served as a member of the Board of Scottish Enterprise Fife. From October 2010 to March 2013 he was Principal at St Mary’s University College Twickenham. He had an earlier career as a lawyer, working in Sydney during 1978-81 and 1984-92 as an articled clerk, then solicitor and barrister.
Esler is a leading figure with an international reputation in the field of social-scientific interpretation of biblical texts. He applies ideas and perspectives from disciplines such as social psychology, anthropology and sociology to Old and New Testament texts to gain a better sense of what they meant to their original audiences. He has also published in the areas of New Testament theology and the Bible and the visual arts. He holds a Doctor of Divinity from the University of Oxford, by submitted work (2008), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (elected 2009).
Life, career and scholarship
Born in Sydney, Australia on 27 August 1952, Esler completed secondary schooling at the then named Marist Brothers High School in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood. He read English, Greek and Law at the University of Sydney (B.A. Hons, LL.B) from 1971 to 1977. During 1977 he also worked as Associate to Mr Justice W. H. Collins of the New South Wales Supreme Court. From 1978 to 1981 he was employed as an articled clerk and solicitor at Allen, Allen and Hemsley, at the same time completing undergraduate Hebrew at Sydney University on a non-degree basis (1978-1980) and undertaking part of an LLM. In 1979 he and four others established National Outlook, an Australian Christian ecumenical monthly magazine devoted to justice and peace issues. In October 1981, Esler went to Magdalen College, Oxford and undertook a D. Phil in New Testament.
At that time the new movement to apply social-scientific ideas and perspectives in biblical interpretation was gaining momentum. Esler adopted this broad approach in his doctorate and applied ideas from the sociology of knowledge and of sectarianism to investigate how social and political factors had affected the way Luke wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. Thus, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality supplied the idea that Luke was legitimating a new social and religious movement to its members in the late first century AD. Esler’s doctoral thesis was accepted by Oxford in 1984 and a modified version was published by Cambridge University Press in 1987.
In 1984 Esler returned to Sydney, initially as a solicitor at Allen, Allen and Hemsley before being called to the Bar in 1986. He completed his LLM in these years. In 1985 he began teaching New Testament courses on a part-time basis at Sydney University. In 1990 Esler attended a meeting in Portland, Oregon of a group of mainly US biblical critics committed to social-scientific interpretation. At this meeting those present formally constituted themselves as "The Context Group: A Project for the Study of the Bible in its Socio-Cultural Context". Although of diverse interests, all members accepted the importance of Mediterranean anthropology in understanding the context of ancient Greco-Roman world. Esler remains a member of the Context Group and has written on its history and modus operandi.
In 1992 Esler was appointed Reader in New Testament in St Andrews University, becoming Professor of Biblical Criticism there in 1995. At St Andrews Esler initially published research which drew on his initial focus on the sociology of knowledge and of sectarianism and his expanding interests in Mediterranean anthropology, millennialism and magic. Esler returned to the application of Mediterranean anthropology to biblical texts in Sex, Wives, and Warriors: Reading Biblical Narrative With Its Ancient Audience (2011). Esler has formulated an approach called ‘archival ethnography’ to assist in the interpretation of the legal papyri from 70 to 200 CE that survive from caves in the Dead Sea region. In 2018 he applied the anthropology and sociology of gossip to the Book of Ruth in an article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, an article that attracted a positive comment in a statement from the outgoing editor of the journal.