He served a curacy in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, after which he was invited to become

chaplain and tutor at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1931 (a post he held until 1935). Farrer
was a Fellow and Chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1935 to 1960.[18] In 1937, he
married Katharine Dorothy Newton, (daughter of the Rev. Frederick Henry Joseph
Newton), who would become a mystery novelist.[19] They had one child together in
1939,[20] a daughter Caroline, who became an ecclesiastical embroiderer.[21]

On the death of Oliver Quick in 1959, the Regius Professorship of Divinity became vacant
and Farrer's name was widely canvassed. However, his typological approach to the reading
of scripture, notably in his books on Mark and the Book of Revelation, was out of the
mainstream of biblical scholarship, and his article "On Dispensing with Q" (one of the
supposed lost sources of the Gospels) raised a furore on both sides of the Atlantic. Henry
Chadwick was appointed instead.[22] The following year, Farrer was appointed as Warden
of Keble College, Oxford, a post which he held until his death on 29 December 1968, aged
64.[23]