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.
[1] 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.
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.
[4] Although of diverse interests, all members accepted the importance of Mediterranean anthropology in understanding the context of ancient Greco-Roman world.
[6] 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.
[13] Esler also writes on the way that biblical stories have been represented in Western art, including his study of two Rembrandt depictions of Saul and David in 1998.
[14] In 2004 he co-authored with artist Jane Boyd a book on the Velázquez painting Christ with Martha and Mary in the National Gallery in London which was covered in The Independent on 18 February 2005 under the heading "Through the looking-glass: how a mirror explains the secrets of a masterpiece" (p. 3).
More recently Esler has contributed a chapter on the biblical paintings of Welsh artist Ivor Williams to Imaging the Bible in Wales 1800-1975 (edited by Martin O’Kane and John Morgan-Guy).
Esler’s understanding of the role of the Arts and Humanities Research Council on his appointment as its chief executive in 2005 appeared in an article in The Guardian.
[21][22] This agreement was renewed for a further three years in September 2012[23] On 1 October 2010 Esler became principal and professor of Biblical iterpretation at St Mary's University College, Twickenham.
[25][26][27] In the same year a number of other issues related to the University College were widely reported in the press: opposition to the decision to merge two academic schools;[28][29] the unpopularity of the suspension of the head of one of those schools;[29][30] protests against the merger and senior management by some theological and other students at the University College and at the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales;[28][31] the legal proceedings preparatory to commencement of a defamation suit brought by Esler and two other members of staff against the editor of a Catholic news site, Josephine Siedleka (one of the three Catholic Women of the Year in 2012), proceedings from which Esler later withdrew;[32][33] a vote of no confidence in Esler by the local branch of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU).
Esler's monograph, God's Court and Courtiers in the Book of the Watchers: Re-interpreting Heaven in 1 Enoch 1-36, was published in November 2017, with endorsements by John Collins and Loren Stuckenbruck.
[46] Since 2015 Esler and his colleague Angus Pryor, practising artist and head of the School of Arts at the University of Gloucestershire, have been engaged in a research collaboration on the ancient Jewish text 1 Enoch (that survived from antiquity only in Ethiopia).
These works have been exhibited online, with supporting iconographic documentation co-authored by Esler and Pryor, under the title Enoch: Heaven’s Messenger, since July 2020.