Jonathan William Robie

Jonathan Robie passed away on October 26, 2026 in Durham, North Carolina. He was a man of great faith, always looking for what God was trying to teach him, and a man of great love as a husband, father, brother, son and friend.  

Jonathan cared immensely about the relationships he built with family, friends, and the communities in which he took part. Growing up in Lakewood, NY as the son of Harry and Laura Robie, Jonathan graduated from Southwestern High School and completed his undergraduate and Masters degrees at Michigan State University. There he met and married his first wife, Esther, with whom he had three children (Reesa, Emily, and Aiden). When the two oldest children were young, the family moved to Berlin, Germany for eight years and then returned to the United States and established themselves in Durham, North Carolina. Following the end of his first marriage, Jonathan was attending a single parents event when he met Kathy. They fell deeply in love and married in 2009, bringing in her son, Stephen, to complete the family.

To know Jonathan was to know his stories, from bringing his handmade fifes to historical reenactments as a high schooler to participating in reunification ceremonies in Berlin after the Wall fell, from hiking through the Grand Canyon with his father and brothers to creating a lasagna garden. Jonathan was curious and a creative thinker. He had so many interests – hiking, barefoot running, backpacking, playing a multitude of instruments, languages, sailing, raising chickens, duck and elephant jokes, country dance, coffee, traveling, learning about other cultures and many others. He had endless energy and passion for each of his interests, and he was always learning and sharing with those around him.

In the first part of his career, he worked for Siemens, POET Software, Texcel, Software AG, DataDirect, Red Hat and Dell/EMC. During this time, he spent nearly twenty years at the W3C as lead editor of the XPath and XQuery specifications, helping design foundational query languages for structured web data. In addition, he founded the b-greek online forum for beginners and scholars to learn and discuss biblical Greek and he frequently spoke at Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meetings. He continued forming communities when he created biblicalhumanities.org in 2013 and when he helped organize the Copenhagen Alliance for Open Biblical Language Resources in 2018. He was very interested in building relationships and bringing people together while creating freely licensed digital resources. In 2017 he decided to take a break from private sector work and focus on finding his dream job which he hoped would incorporate the Bible, his knowledge of biblical Greek and linguistics and his extensive technical background. In 2018 he became the Program Manager of the Paratext Ecosystem, then worked for Clear Bible and in 2023 he began working for Biblica as a Senior Research & Development Fellow and was on the steering committee for the Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship. These were the best years of his career as they reflected his commitment to God and spreading God’s word.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2024. He was determined to continue working full-time, participating in Durham Mennonite Church and living his life as fully as possible and that is what he did. And yet it was still too short.

Jonathan is survived by his wife of 17 years, Kathy Zopfi, his children Reesa Robie, Emily Robie, Aiden Swim-Robie and Stephen Foskey. He is also survived by his mother, Laura Robie, and his brothers David Robie (sister-in-law Durenka) and Steven Robie (sister-in-law Jackie) and his sister Sarabeth Brownrobie (brother-in-law Thomas) and many nieces and nephews. He is predeceased by his father, Harry Robie.