Harry Eugene Gaylord
Died November 20, 2006
Harry was born in DeLand, FL and prepared for Yale at Eustis High School there.
At Yale, Harry was a member of Davenport, majored in English and was active in the Political Union and WYBC. He was a leader of the Westminster Foundation and the Council of the Yale Christian Community as well as a deacon of Battell Chapel.
Harry obtained his Masters from New York University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Theology from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Dr. Gaylord was later a Professor of Theology at the University of Leiden and the University of Groningen, both in the Netherlands.
It was reported in 1974 that the Rev. Dr. Harry E. Gaylord was executive editor of Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum Ad Novum Testamentum (Compendia on the Jewish Background to the New Testament). This work, intended to cover 10 volumes, the first of which, The Jewish People In The First Century, had just been co-published in Amsterdam by Van Gorcum and Company, and in Philadelphia by the Fortress Press. This project was described as the most comprehensive analysis ever attempted of the history, culture, social and political life, theological concepts and inter-relationships between the Jewish and Christian communities of the first two centuries of the present era. It was done in conjunction with a study of the implications of these findings for modern Jewish-Christian relations by an international group of renowned scholars. Sponsors of the project included the Vatican Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity, the World Council of Churches, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Netherlands Organization for the Advancement of Pure Research, the Prince Bernhard Fund and the Evangelical Church of the Rhineland.
In 1997 Harry retired to Durham, England where he became an Honorary Fellow of the Theological Department at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom.
Harry died November 20, 2006, survived by his wife, Alexandra, whom he married on New Year’s Eve,1977, and by two children, Benjamin Gould and Tamer Crosby Adamowicz.
Dodd Fischer remembers: Harry was a noble man, always considerate, who studied religion and earned his Ph.D., and contributed in many ways to mankind, in the U.S., then overseas, finally settling in Durham, England, where he died, disheartened.
William Patton remembers: Harry lived in the same entry way in Davenport. He was among the most sociable people I ever knew. He sat every evening in a big armchair near the corridor with his door open so that anyone going upstairs would look in. Quick greetings usually turned into long conversations.