Barclay's father was a bank manager. He attended Dalziel High School in Motherwell and then studied classics at the University of Glasgow 1925–1929, before studying divinity. He studied at the University of Marburg during the year 1932-33. After being ordained in the Church of Scotland in 1933, he was minister at Trinity Church Renfrew from 1933 to 1946, afterwards returning to the University of Glasgow as lecturer in New Testament from 1947, and as Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism from 1963.
Religious views
Barclay described himself theologically as a "liberal evangelical." Barclay expressed his personal views in his A Spiritual Autobiography, and Clive L. Rawlins elaborates in William Barclay: prophet of goodwill: the authorised biography. They included:
belief in universal salvation: "I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God."
pacifism: "war is mass murder".
evolution: "We believe in evolution, the slow climb upwards of man from the level of the beasts. Jesus is the end and climax of the evolutionary process because in Him men met God. The danger of the Christian faith is that we set up Jesus as a kind of secondary God. The Bible never, as it were, makes a second God of Jesus. Rather, it stresses the utter dependence of Jesus on God."
While professor, he decided to dedicate his life to "making the best biblical scholarship available to the average reader". The eventual result was the Daily Study Bible, a set of 17 commentaries on the New Testament, published by Saint Andrew Press, the Church of Scotland's publishing house. Despite the series name, these commentaries do not set a program of regular study. Rather, they go verse by verse through Barclay's own translation of the New Testament, listing and examining every possible interpretation known to Barclay and providing all the background information he considered possibly relevant, all in layman's terms. The commentaries were fully updated with the help of William Barclay's son, Ronnie Barclay, in recent years and they are now known as the New Daily Study Bible series. The 17 volumes of the set were all best-sellers and continue to be so to this day. A companion set giving a similar treatment to the Old Testament was endorsed but not written by Barclay. In 2008 Saint Andrew Press began taking the content of the New Daily Study Bibles and producing pocket-sized thematic titles called Insights. The Insights books are introduced by contemporary authors, broadcasters and scholars, including Nick Baines and Diane-Louise Jordan. Barclay wrote many other popular books, always drawing on scholarship but written in a highly accessible style. In The Mind of Jesus he states that his aim was "to make the figure of Jesus more vividly alive, so that we may know him better and love him more". Barclay's books on the gospels and Jesus include:
