(A guest commentary by Michael Parker, The Presbyterian Outlook.) At a General Assembly luncheon in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2006, the then executive presbyter of Shenango Presbytery, David Dawson, introduced Kenneth Bailey as “the most important New Testament scholar in our generation.” He recalled this introduction at Bailey’s memorial service in California last May, admitting that at the time “it seemed rather extravagant.” But then he observed that five years before Jim Walther, a New Testament scholar at Pittsburgh Seminary, had said, “Ken’s work will be discovered and become widely influential fifty years from now.”
Bailey, who died at the age of 85 on May 26, 2016, was a Presbyterian mission worker who spent 40 years in the Middle East. He was born in 1930 to Presbyterian missionaries, and he spent his early youth in Cairo where he absorbed the Arabic language and culture. In 1942 at the age of 12, he and his family fled Egypt as Erwin Rommel’s Panzer tanks rumbled toward Cairo. After receiving a B.A. in philosophy at Monmouth College in Illinois and an M. Div. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, Bailey married Ethel Jean Milligan, a microbiologist who worked with Jonas Salk to produce the first polio vaccine. The newly married couple traveled as Presbyterian mission workers to Egypt in 1955.
Working in the villages of Upper Egypt, Bailey continued to observe and learn the Arabic culture. Later he served as a teacher at the Pre-theological Program of Cairo’s Evangelical Seminary in the Upper Egyptian city of Assiut. In 1965 the Baileys moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where Ken taught at the Near East School of Theology (NEST). In 1970 the Baileys returned to the U.S., and Ken began a New Testament doctoral program at Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis. Having already mastered Arabic, he then acquired fluency in Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac.
The Baileys returned to Beirut in 1972 where Ken took up his work as a New Testament scholar at NEST, heading the biblical department. Through much of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Baileys remained in Beirut. In addition to Ken and his wife Ethel, the Bailey family now also included a son, David, and a daughter, Sara. In 1985 the Baileys moved to Jerusalem; and from 1990 to 1995 they were based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Ken and Ethel retired in 1995 to New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
During his retirement, Bailey was much in demand as a speaker, delivering lectures across the world: from NEST in Beirut, to Oxford University in England, to Fuller Theological Seminary in California. Dawson estimates that he averaged 150 lectures a year. He also wrote over 150 articles, 10 books, and the script for a Cairo-produced film, “Finding the Lost.”
Bailey’s first and perhaps most well-known book was “The Cross & the Prodigal: Luke 15 Through the Eyes of Middle Eastern Peasants,” first published in 1973 and revised and expanded in 2005. In the introduction to the revised edition, Bailey laments the near invisibility of Arab Christians in the West today.