  In 1932, at the age of 17, Prior left his home town, sleepy Masterton in the North Island of New Zealand, to become a student at the University of Otago in the South Island city of Dunedin. He seemed to prefer the South Island, saying the North Island gave him ‘the willies’. The son of a doctor, he initially planned a career as a biologist, but was soon beckoned away by theology and philosophy, graduating from Otago in 1935 with a B.A. in philosophy. At Otago he had thoughts of entering the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, and he was accepted into the required program of study. ‘Who’, he had asked himself in a 1931 manuscript, ‘are the greatest thinkers the world has known?’—answering ‘I have no hesitation in placing JESUS OF NAZARETH at the top of this list’ (Prior 1931: 107). In 1936, he abandoned the idea of entering the ministry, although he did subsequently work for a time as a locum minister in Birmingham, England, during his ‘bohemian period’ at the end of the 1930s.