PROFESSOR PADDY BEST: 1917-2004

I just came from the memorial service for Paddy Best (Ernest Best), held at St. Leonard's Church in St. Andrews, officiated by Rev. Alan McDonald, and with a tribute by Professor John Riches of Glasgow University. For biographical details about Paddy, go to this obituary. I'll concentrate here on some personal reminiscences from the service. Paddy started out as an Ulster Protestant minister in Northern Ireland. He never joined the Orange Lodge, even though he served for 15 years a parish with strong links to them. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in a manse that had no electricity or running water. He took his first academic post here at the Divinity School of the University of St. Andrews in 1963 at the age of 46, then moved to Glasgow University in 1974. John Riches reports that when Paddy came to Glasgow, he was described to John as a cross between a dynamo and a leprechaun. He was well-known for his sense of humor. He liked golf jokes, preachers jokes, political jokes, and academic put-downs. Professor Riches quoted from a lecture Paddy gave to the Irish Biblical Association on the purpose of the Gospel of Mark in which he quoted another scholar, he said, not because his view was accepted � it was almost universally rejected � but "because it permits me to stress the opposite." Alan McDonald also related that in 1965, when Paddy's book The Temptation and the Passion was published, he was known to say that it would sell well in train stations if put in a plain cover.

I did not know Paddy Best well, but I did encounter him now and again in my early years here. Once when Professor Robert Carroll came from Glasgow to lecture at our postgraduate seminar, I took the two of them to lunch, during which Paddy told a disrespectful joke about two prominent Irish politicians. I won't repeat the joke here. (Alas, Paddy and Bob Carroll are both gone now.) Paddy also once commented to me that it was great to be a Professor in his day, because "we didn't have to do any work." Anyone who knows his story or his bibliography will know how seriously to take that one.

Requiescat in pace.