Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on December 29, 1943, Hurtado was educated at Central Bible College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He completed his PhD in 1973 at Case Western Reserve University under the supervision of Eldon Jay Epp with the dissertation Codex Washingtonianus in the Gospel of Mark: Its Textual Relationships and Scribal Characteristics. His first academic appointment was at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he taught from 1975 to 1978. Prior to moving to Canada in 1975 he pastored a church in Chicago's most Jewish suburb, Skokie, Illinois. Thereafter he moved to the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where he was promoted to full Professor in 1988 and taught until 1996. During his time there, he established the University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities and served as initial Director from 1990 to 1992. Shortly after his appointment at the University of Edinburgh, he established the Centre for the Study of Christian Origins, which focuses on Christianity in the first three centuries. He made significant advances in understanding Jewish Monotheism and early Christian devotion to Jesus. He was an authority on the Gospels, the Apostle Paul, early Christology, the Jewish background of the New Testament, and New Testament textual criticism. He was perhaps most well known for his studies on the early emergence of a devotion to Jesus expressed in beliefs about Jesus sharing God's glory, and in a "devotional pattern" in which Jesus features prominently. Hurtado argued that this Jesus-devotion comprises a novel "mutation" in ancient Jewish monotheistic practice. In his later publications, he also urged greater awareness of the historical value of earliest Christian manuscripts as key physical artifacts of early Christianity, drawing attention to such phenomena as the nomina sacra, the Christian preference for the codex bookform, and a number of other features. He was elected a member of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1984, and received the Rh Institute Award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship and Research in the Humanities in 1986. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2008, and President of the British New Testament Society from 2009 to 2012. He won research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He gave invited lectures in many universities in the UK and other countries, and was a Visiting Fellow at Macquarie University in Australia in 2005. The School of Divinity announced that Hurtado had died of cancer in his sleep on November 25, 2019.
