William Barclay

William Barclay  was a Scottish author, radio and television presenter, Church of Scotland minister and Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow.

Barclay's father was a bank manager. He attended Dalziel High School in Motherwell and then studied classics at the University of Glasgow 1925-1929,  before studying divinity.

After being ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1933, he was minister at Trinity Church Renfrew from 1933 to 1946, afterwards returning to the University of Glasgow as lecturer in New Testament from 1947, and as professor from 1963. He died on 24 January 1978 in Glasgow, Scotland .

Barclay wrote many other popular books, always drawing on scholarship but written in a highly accessible style. In The Mind of Jesus (1960) he states that his aim was "to make the figure of Jesus more vividly alive, so that we may know him better and love him more".