Ray Clendenen has been a staff worker with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a Baptist pastor in Illinois, a Christian college professor (Philadelphia Biblical University and then Criswell College), an adjunct seminary professor (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), and an editor. He is currently Senior Editor Academic Books for B&H Publishing Group, a division of Lifeway Christian Resources. He is also the general editor of The New American Commentary, 38 volumes of which have now been published, and he is the series editor for the New American Commentary Studies in Bible and Theology (NACSBT).
Ray studied anthropology at Rice University (B.A.), Hebrew and Old Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M.), Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Dropsie University (M.A.), and Linguistics and ancient Greek history at The University of Texas at Arlington, associated with The Summer Institute of Linguistics (Ph.D.).
Besides encouraging and assisting authors of academic books in biblical and theological studies, Ray’s special interests are text linguistics (also known as discourse analysis), Hebrew grammar, translation theory, hermeneutics, and the Minor Prophets (especially the book of Malachi).
Ray lives in Brentwood, Tennessee with his dedicated and gifted wife Mimi and college-bound son Jonathan. His daughter Ann and her husband Will and their sons Adam and James.
Ray served as Old Testament editor for a study Bible, wrote a brief popular commentary on the Minor Prophets for The Holman Bible Handbook edited by David Dockery (B&H 1992), then a more scholarly commentary on Malachi (with Haggai), volume 21a in The New American Commentary series (B&H 2004). He was the associate editor of the Holman Christian Standard Bible translation project (2004), an associate editor of the Apologetics Study Bible (B&H 2007), and co-editor of Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialogue (B&H 2008). He has also written many chapters/articles and reviews for books and scholarly journals.