He received Bachelor(Honours) Master of Arts (Wales), Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Oxfordshire), Doctor of Philosophy (Middlesex), Doctor of Letters (Wales), Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, FBS. He was educated at Huish’s Grammar School, Taunton, Somerset. Street David’s University College, Lampeter (now the Lampeter campus of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David), Lincoln College, Oxford, and Middlesex University.
He initially worked as a teacher in a comprehensive school before holding posts in further education colleges in Southampton and Basingstoke. He was also an inspector in the post-compulsory sector for some years. In 1999-2000 he was Hartley Fellow at Southampton University and in 2004 was appointed Academic Director for Lifelong Learning at Westminster Institute of, Oxford Brookes University.
In 2006 he was awarded the title Professor.
Gibson has been described as ‘one of that school of ecclesiastical historians… which in the late twentieth century has given fresh impetus and vitality to the revisionist view of the eighteenth-century Church..’ (John Guy in Journal of Welsh Religious History, 1997) Gibson’s championing of the ‘optimistic’ view of the eighteenth century Church has drawn criticism from historians. The debate has been most recently aired in Reviews in History (Institute of Historical Research London, ).
His biography of Benjamin Hoadly, though generally well received, has been viewed as an overly strong statement of the optimist’s defence of a latitudinarian bishop (“a valuable if perhaps slightly overstated reappraisal of one of the foremost pillars of the Georgian religious establishment” –Robin Eagles ‘The Eighteenth Century’ in Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, December 2006) In October 2009 he was visiting fellow at Baylor University, Texas. In April 2011 he was visiting fellow at Yale University.
