John Lee Thompson

John L. Thompson taught at Fuller Theological Seminary from 1985 until 2019, serving as Professor of Historical Theology as well as the Gaylen and Susan Byker Professor of Reformed Theology. Trained as a Reformation historian, he has written extensively on exegetical history and gender issues.

Among his many essays and reviews, he has contributed to A Companion to Paul in the Reformation (Brill 2009) and The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin (2004), and has written popular essays for Sacred History magazine and Modern Reformation. His study of the “texts of terror” in the history of exegesis appeared as Writing the Wrongs (Oxford 2001), and he continued in a more popular vein in Reading the Bible with the Dead: What You Can Learn from the History of Exegesis That You Can’t Learn from Exegesis Alone (Eerdmans 2007). In 2012, he translated and edited the initial volume of The Reformation Commentary on Scripture, on Genesis 1–11.

Most recently, he has completed (with Albert Gootjes) a critical translation of some of the unpublished poetry of Anna Maria van Schurman. A collection of his essays on the history of exegesis, Accommodating a Discordant Bible, has also just appeared with Cascade Books in July 2026.