Oxtoby was born on July 29, 1933, in Kentfield, California into a family of scholars. Both his father and grandfather were ministers and teachers of the Old Testament, and both were deans of San Francisco Theological Seminary, in San Anselmo, California.
After graduating with a degree in Philosophy from Stanford University, Oxtoby completed masters and doctoral degrees within a year of each other at Princeton University, specializing in pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions. From 1958-1960 he worked in Jerusalem as part of the team that studied the Dead Sea Scrolls.
He also was editor of the weekly Tam News. Oxtoby taught at Yale University from 1966-1971, before accepting a full professorship at the University of Toronto"s Trinity College, where he taught for 28 years. Driven by his interest in comparative religion, Oxtoby travelled to more than 100 countries and studied more than a dozen languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, Ugaritic and Sanskrit.
In terms of publications, Oxtoby was probably best known for the two-volume introductory textbook he edited, called World Religions: Western Traditions and World Religions: Eastern Traditions, published by Oxford University Press.
