Committed to preserving the memories of G. B. Caird and Errol Flynn, he spent the final weeks of his life writing about the historic achievements of both men.
The first-century writer wishes his readers to know that in Jesus God has restored the human race to its proper predestined place "above the angels" (Psalm 8:4-6; Hurst 1987).
His claim (following G. B. Caird) that Paul the Apostle represents both the earliest and the highest thinking about Jesus in the New Testament (as opposed, for instance, to the Gospel of John) runs counter to the view of the majority of scholars, and in this case he has had a notable disagreement with University of Durham theology Professor James Dunn (Hurst, 1986); he and Dunn have appeared in the same volume "discussing" the question (Martin and Dodd, 1998).
Hurst's interest in the subject of New Testament Theology, sparked by his posthumous completion of G. B. Caird's work of that title, remains a continuing thrust of his research.
The messianism of the Dead Sea scrolls has been one of the most widely discussed topics of the past sixty years in western religious circles; here it has been almost a dogma among scholars that the members of the Qumran community were idiosyncratic in that they expected not one, but two Messiahs.
He displayed a special fondness for crime films, having publicly commented on three of what he considered (in addition to The Godfather trilogy) to be among the most historically crucial: Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties and (most significantly) White Heat.