Gifts from the family of beloved USF religious studies professor and archeologist James Strange keep alive his memory and impact — marked by touch of Spielberg

Feb. 2, 2023

During the summer of 1981, a funny thing happened in the life of James Strange, then a distinguished USF religious studies professor and acclaimed Biblical archeologist. His home phone began ringing off the hook with calls from newspaper reporters — each one inquiring about a certain new movie featuring a mystical ark.

The writers couldn’t wait to hear what Strange thought about the Steven Spielberg blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones, the fictional fedora-wearing university archeology professor racing against the Nazis to find the supernatural relic.

Their intense interest was understandable. After all, Strange was a real-life university professor and archeologist who supervised digs in ancient Biblical lands, donned a distinctive leather hat, and amazingly had discovered near the time of the movie’s release — during an excavation of relics in Galali, Bahrain — an actual ark of his own.

Of course, it didn’t possess powers that could lead to world domination, but instead was a half-ton, limestone rock dating back several thousand years. Still, the media’s playful comparisons were irresistible, even getting attention from People magazine.

“Jim got phone calls from everyone,” says Carolyn Strange of her late husband of 57 years, who died of complications from cancer in 2018. “One writer from Miami even asked what happened when he opened it up. And Jim replied, ‘Well, it’s a stone, you can’t open it.’ And the writer said, ‘Oh yes you can, I saw the movie.’”

Strange’s son, James, recalls his father sitting in the living room in his underwear one morning, fielding countless phone calls about the movie on the family’s rotary phone. “It seemed like every time he hung up, the phone would ring again,” says his son, one of the couple’s four children and a New Testament professor in the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Alabama.

“I always remind people that my dad was never chasing Nazis,” Joanna Strange, a New York City writer and film producer, says with a laugh.

But while Strange didn’t save the world, his renowned work from the 1960s through 2015 unearthed new ones. He gave voice and recognition to lost civilizations.

“That’s what motivated my father,” his son says. “Whenever he talked about it or wrote about his reasons, it was quite clear that he felt a connection to the people whose belongings he was excavating. He really thought about the human beings who were no longer around and giving them the opportunity to speak — even a little bit — by what he was able to uncover and publish.”

Now, in the same way that Strange endeavored to keep those memories alive, his family has done the same for him through the USF Foundation — funding the James F. Strange Endowed Chair in the Department of Religious Studies, a position held by Michael DeJonge, PhD, who was hired and mentored by Strange.

Carolyn has also established a Religious Studies scholarship to provide financial assistance for future generations hoping to follow in Strange’s footsteps, as well as an operating fund to help support pressing expenses in the department. What’s more, the Stranges have given to the university in one way or another for 45 consecutive years.

“We’re so grateful to Carolyn and her children for their incredible generosity,” says Interim Provost Eric Eisenberg. “I feel fortunate to have known Jim for many years — he was a remarkably gifted professor and archeologist and his legacy lives on powerfully at USF.”

“Speaking as the department chair, I can’t say enough about the stability that this has provided,” DeJonge adds. “And from a personal perspective, as the holder of the Jim Strange chair, I’m thrilled and honored.  Jim was extraordinarily generous with his students, and I’d like to carry that on.”

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He began his journey amid humble, East Texas roots, delivering newspapers as a child and spending summers during high school working in oil fields with his stepdad. Surprisingly, when it came to religion, he was a skeptic. “Oh, he loved teasing his Christian friends,” Carolyn says. “He’d bait them about their beliefs.”

Born in Kerrville near San Antonio, Strange loved the outdoors near his home of Tyler, too, and even achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. But in his mid-teens, he went to stay with a family in Arizona, with life at home not always easy with his stepfather. As it happened, his host family attended a small Baptist church and invited him to attend, where several teen girls caught his eye.

“He started talking to them, and they told him he wasn’t going to make any headway with them unless he started going to church,” says Carolyn.

So Strange kept attending every Sunday and one evening at home had what his wife describes as a religious experience. “He said, ‘Jesus, if you’re up there, please come into my life’ — and that’s when things began to turn for him,” she says.

Soon after, Strange was accepted at Rice University, where he intended to pursue a chemistry major — much to the approval of his stepfather, who promised to pay his college tuition if he continued on that track. But at the end of his sophomore year, he felt unfulfilled and changed his major to philosophy. Before he was 20, he envisioned a new career path as a religious studies professor in a state university.

That was around the same time he met Carolyn, a year behind him and also from Kerrville, at an off-campus Baptist student union. She had started college elsewhere before transferring to Rice. “We didn’t date right away — in fact, he went off and got engaged to somebody else,” Carolyn recounts. “But his fiancée broke off the engagement and we started to date my junior year.”

Life was about to take a sharp turn after Strange’s graduation in 1959. When Carolyn graduated a year later, they were married. Strange had planned to attend Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, but his Rice philosophy professor prevailed upon him to consider Yale University’s prestigious divinity school instead. He was accepted, and soon the young couple was off to the Ivy League institution. In addition to his studies, Strange was trained in nonviolent protest and engaged in Civil Rights sit-ins at lunch counters.

After his second year at Yale in 1960-61, he thought Texas might be a better place to raise a family, so he and Carolyn relocated to Kerrville, where Elizabeth was born in 1961 and James in 1963. Strange taught at Schreiner Institute for two years, returning to Yale in 1963 to complete his divinity master’s. Upon graduating in 1964, he enrolled at Drew University in northern New Jersey, balancing his studies with raising the children while Carolyn worked. He eventually earned his New Testament doctorate in 1970, while also pursuing his passion for learning new languages.

But it was a job posting one year earlier — about a dig in Gezer, associated in the Hebrew Bible with Joshua and Solomon — that changed everything.

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Strange had no money to make the trip but he was instantly drawn to the idea of being part of a Biblical excavation. He contacted the professor in charge and asked if he could join the team as supervisor — despite never having been on a dig in his life. The answer was a resounding “no.”

“But two weeks later, the professor called and said, ‘Can you come over here — one of my supervisors just quit,’” Carolyn recalls.

With that, Strange was on the team and spent much of the 1969 digging season excavating at Gezer. He was hooked, and the next year received a fellowship from the W.F. Albright Institute of Archeological Research in Jerusalem. Carolyn and the older two children, Mary Elizabeth, then 9, and James, 7, joined him as he worked on three digs in 1970-71.

“He never said that he thought God gave him teaching, but he did say he thought God gave him archeology,” Carolyn says. “It was hard work — not just physical but with funding, personnel and bringing along the family.”

Indeed, the digs were full family affairs, involving all the children and other family members, too. During a span from 1970-81, he collaborated with a biblical scholar and archeologist from Duke University, Eric Myers, excavating four synagogues in the Upper Galilee. Meanwhile, Strange dug in places like Judea, Samaria and Sepphoris, just a few miles from Jesus’ birthplace of Nazareth, where he found large buildings, aqueducts and an outdoor theater, and continued his study of synagogues. Some of his other finds — including pottery, coins and mosaics — were displayed at the Smithsonian.

“I remember from the time I was 12 and Joanna was 7, and my parents started bringing us every summer,” says Katherine, an archeologist living in Europe. “Summer vacation was, ‘We’re not going to Disney; we’re going to Israel and excavate, so I worked in a trench and learned about archeology. My dad had very devoted volunteers, including his sister, who came for many years. And he was great about treating his kids like grown-ups, saying things like, ‘Oh, you have such a good archeological eye, Katherine.’ He was really pleased to have us along and show us what he loved to do so much.”

Strange’s love for his work took a new direction when he was hired at USF in 1972, after teaching high school English for a year in New Jersey. He was one of the first hires in the religious studies department and taught for the next 46 years. At one point, he served as dean of the college (then called Arts and Letters) and helped build the department into a shining star of the university.

“USF was largely a teaching institution when he arrived, and before the university’s meteoric ascent as a research institution, he brought serious research credibility,” says DeJonge. “He would definitely have been ahead of his time.”

Though he demanded the best from his students, he felt a genuine love for them, says Carolyn. And there is no doubt they loved the professor so easy to spot with his Aussie bushman’s hat, leather vest, a Santa Claus-like beard, and his habit of often handing cash to students who needed a little helping hand. After his death at age 80 four years ago, his family published a booklet that included many tributes and remembrances from students through the years. One, from Jess Bonds, read:

“Dr. Strange was my mentor. He inspired me during my undergraduate years at USF when I happened to wander over to Cooper Hall one day, an aimless junior looking for purpose, and asked him to help me focus on something meaningful. Later on, in an Albertson’s parking lot of all places, he encouraged me to apply for the graduate program in religious studies. And further down the road, he served on my doctoral committee. He was always there. He’s the reason I teach. He was an exceptional man; an everyman.”

His impact on his children was just as profound, as Joanna describes: “For a man with a PhD, you would think that he would expect his children to be highly educated. But one of the great things about Dad is that he didn't. He expected us to be kind, to be compassionate, to be nice, and to treat people with respect. But that was it.”

Joanna also remembers his innate sense of fun, whether it was his frequent cornball puns to put his students at ease or bringing her at age 8 to USF on Halloween in full costume. “I was a roller-skating waitress and I remember just rolling up and down the hallways of Cooper Hall handing out candy,” she says. “He took all of us to school at different times. I used to just sit under his desk and play with things when he was dean and holding a meeting.”

On the serious side, Strange wasn’t driven to prove anything in the Bible. He simply wanted to explore where Jesus and others lived their lives, and his preeminence led to lectures all over the world. He was interviewed by ABC’s Peter Jennings about historical aspects of Jesus and the archeology of Israel. He was also featured on the topic in National Geographic and numerous TV specials.

“Dad wanted to imagine Jesus and his disciples being at the same sites we could see from the hill of Sepphoris, looking out on the valleys,” Katherine explains. “He wanted to understand what daily life would have been like for Jesus and his followers.”

His family is working today on a project of its own: publishing Strange’s findings from Sepphoris and many of his other excavations. Meanwhile, they have given a gift that will bolster USF’s religious studies department long into the future — a fitting way to honor the professor who brought the program, and the past, to life.