In 1945 he married Viola Mary Newport, known to all as 'Mollie' whom he had met while at Oxford and in 1946 they moved to Canada when he accepted the post of Professor of Old Testament at St. Stephen's College,[7] Edmonton, Alberta.

His work in the fields of Old and New Testament (he remains one of the few modern biblical interpreters to have held chairs in both) led to three honorary doctorates as well as the earned Oxford D.D., election to the British Academy (and the granting of its Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies), and appointment to be the Dean Ireland's Professor and Professorial Fellow at The Queen's College, Oxford.

For Caird it may have been a difficult decision; but his final choice indicates that the opportunity to spend the remaining years of his career as a scholar and a teacher, rather than an administrator-cum-teacher, was to him, welcome".

Shortly after his death, some quick decisions needed to be made, particularly that involving his half-completed New Testament Theology; accordingly, Hurst was appointed Caird's Literary Executor.

These include Marcus Borg, Colin Gunton, Lincoln Hurst, David P. Moessner,[21] John Muddiman, Allison Trites, Francis Watson,[22] and N. T.

[19] In his leisure time he enjoyed (most famously) bird-watching, croquet, snooker, music, theatre, reading mysteries, ping pong, chess, and all forms of puzzles — especially the crossword and jigsaw varieties.

[4] To Caird the home was never just a house: it was a bastion of the family - a center of games, poetry, music, and other cultural activity, where he was, according to Henry Chadwick, "sublimely happy ... it was a microcosm of vigorous debate and breathtaking wit, sparkling with his wife and his three sons and his daughter, whose gifts were a source of deep joy for him.

Caird's first sustained independent commentary, The Gospel of St. Luke, was, as with his previous treatment of 1 and 2 Samuel, full of historical confidence: some reservations notwithstanding, the Old and New Testament writers left behind them sound history.

As usual, Caird's maverick tendencies bubbled to the surface, and produced relatively conservative results in the face of the prevailing mainstream skepticism about the nature and extent of the Pauline writings: Paul, the writer of Colossians and Ephesians, provided wise and far-reaching insights into the universal human experience that will be ignored today at society's peril.

Toward the end of his career he was commissioned to write a number of books, including the New International Critical Commentary on The Epistle to the Hebrews and the volume on Paul in OUP's Past Masters series.

[29] According to two of his students, what marked out all of Caird's work was an erudite, crisp writing style, a wry humour, and an ability to turn old questions on their heads by posing them in new and memorable ways.

"Combining a penetrative knowledge of both Testaments with a rare fastidiousness with words, Caird analysed his texts in a way which for many set a new standard for the field.

These traits, coupled with a fertility of imagination and an almost poetic approach to complex theological issues, produced a potent brew which any who took even a small draught were not likely to forget".

A slim volume from Caird, easily mistaken for a slight or negligible work, is likely to be an explosive charge, packed with pithy wisdom".

[34] He "believed in the perspicuity of the substance of Holy Scripture, a principle which the medieval schoolmen and the Reformation inherited from St. Augustine, but which the disciples of Rudolf Bultmann have found it notoriously hard to share".

[35] Those who read or heard him were well aware that Caird thought British biblical scholarship (that of Dodd in particular) was the last word on the subject, and he found nothing more satisfying than a good joust with German theology.

Caird's views on translation were stated strongly and precisely in almost all of his works, including his articles dealing with the Septuagint and in The Language and Imagery of the Bible.

He railed against the "word substitution" method, which he maintained tried to be faithful to the original Hebrew and Greek syntax and vocabulary, but sacrificed intelligibility in English.

[37] To his delight Caird was able to contribute to the translation panel of the Revised English Bible in the last decade of his life, although he died before his work on that project was able to be brought to completion.

Here he attempted to allow the New Testament writers "to speak for themselves" on a wide variety of topics (predestination, sin, salvation, the life of the church, eschatology, christology).

[42] And, according to C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge, Caird's final work is "a very important book," "brilliant and provocative"; it causes the New Testament "to speak for itself by exact scrutiny and deft interrogation and with a sensitive awareness of the hazards of bridging the time-gap; and the results are fresh and radical".

[44] As with other New Testament specialists who had a strong classical training, Caird was baffled by the skepticism with which gospel commentators and others who write on the Jesus of history have traditionally looked upon their historical sources.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Cambridge-trained classicist, Caird saw Paul not so much as a conveyor of supernatural information but as a brilliantly innovative thinker, a skillful interpreter of the scriptures and of the mind of Jesus, or "humanity at its very best".

[51] Paul was also a revolutionary, as Caird saw him: one who was fervently committed to the socially convulsive implications of the gospel, especially in such concerns as class divisions within society (including the equality of women), the constant corruption of political and religious authority, and the unity of the Christian church as a rebuke to a warring and fractured world.

[52] In all his works Caird never shrank from making clear his unqualified admiration for what he saw as the frequently misunderstood apostle; yet this could hardly be mistaken for hero worship.

It is still largely believed in scholarly circles that Jewish apocalyptic had relinquished all hope for this world and expected an imminent divine intervention as the final thunder-clap of history.

Instead, by something called "prophetic camera technique," they used metaphorical imagery that "telescoped" events within history and the ultimate victory of God at the end of time.

Many of those who went to his lectures remarked not only on the vigorous academic discipline they were invited to share, but on the direct relationship they were encouraged to see between honest probing and the preaching of the Gospel" (Donald Sykes[62]).

What Caird displayed in a highly illuminating way is the manner in which theological conviction, literary values, and historical reasoning worked together in that current of learning .

[64] And finally, on a personal level, "those who knew him will never forget that tall figure who seemed to walk faster than anyone else, black Oxford gown trailing him in the breeze, who always spoke in public without notes, and who—perhaps as a fitting symbol of his life—always seemed to be out of the lecture hall before his listeners had written down his last word or had had the opportunity to consider the meaning of what they had just heard".