Paul N. Anderson (born May 17, 1956) is an American New Testament scholar conducting research on the historical, cultural, and theological background of the Gospel of John, the historical Jesus, Quakers and Spirituality studies. He is Professor of Biblical and Quaker Studies at George Fox University since 1989 and was a founding member of the John, Jesus, and History Project at the Society of Biblical Literature (2002-2016). He also serves as Extraordinary Professor of Religion at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa and has served as a visiting professor or researcher at Haverford College, Yale Divinity School, Princeton Theological Seminary, the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, the Radboud University of Nijmegen, and Chapman University.
Anderson has published over 200 essays and is NT Editor at the Biblical Interpretation Series (Brill), co-editor of the Johannine Monograph Series (Wipf and Stock), and editor of the Quakers and the Discipline Series (FAHE). He edited Evangelical Friend (1990-1994) and Quaker Religious Thought (2000-2011). He has also written many articles for The Huffington Post and served on a team translating the Johannine writings for the New American Bible.
Education
Anderson received a B.A. in Psychology and Christian Ministries at Malone University and pursued graduate studies at Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Portland State University. He received an MDiv from the Earlham School of Religion and a PhD from Glasgow University.
Research and academic career
Thesis
Anderson's Glasgow thesis on The Christology of the Fourth Gospel (1996, 1997, 2010) found diachronic theories of John's composition insufficient in terms of stylistic, contextual, and theological evidence; and because 85% of its material is distinctive, with none of the contacts with other gospels being identical or verbatim, John's tradition is not derivative from Synoptic traditions. Anderson's monograph thus identified four sources of John's theological tensions: the dialectical thinking of the evangelist, the Jewish agency schema (Deut. 18:15-22), the dialectical Johannine situation (featuring several crises over several decades), and the rhetorical designs of the narrator. John's theological, historical, and literary riddles are unpacked more fully in Anderson's introduction to John (The Riddles of the Fourth Gospel, 2011), where his overall Johannine theory (the Dialogical Autonomy of the Fourth Gospel) is laid out as an improvement over alternative views.