John Vivian Mortland Sturdy (27 October 1933 – 6 July 1996) was an English clergyman and academic. He was Dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and in later years, also a part-time Librarian at the Faculty of Divinity based at St. John's College, on the corner of All Saints Passage.
Sturdy studied at Christ Church, Oxford.[1] He married Jill Evans in 1961, and they had twelve children including nine adoptions.[2]
Sturdy was executive editor of The Cambridge History of Judaism.[3] He wrote the commentary on the Book of Numbers for The Cambridge Bible Commentary on the New English Bible; a review in the Scottish Journal of Theology suggested that he maintained "a good balance between being informative and being gently critical of some of the values expressed in the text."[4] .
Sturdy was working on a book on the dating of the New Testament when he died. This was a response to J. A. T. Robinson's 1976 book Redating the New Testament. Sturdy argued that the books of the New Testament were written later than the scholarly consensus believed.[5] Sturdy's unfinished work was later published as Redrawing the Boundaries: The Date of Early Christian Literature (2007).
He died of heart failure on 6 July 1996.[6]
Sturdy was a coin collector, and after his death his widow donated 1,751 twentieth-century world coins from his collection to the Fitzwilliam Museum.[7]