John Burgon

John William Burgon (August 21, 1813 - August 4, 1888), English divine, was born at Smyrna, the son of a Turkey merchant, who was a skilled numismatist and afterwards became an assistant in the antiquities department of the British Museum.

Biography

His mother was Greek. After a few years of business life, Burgon went to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1841, and took his degree in 1845. The same year he took the Newdigate Prize for his sonnet Petra, a poem chiefly known for its famous couplet

Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime

A rose-red city half as old as time.

The full sonnet:

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,

by labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;

But from the rock as by magic grown,

eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!

Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,

where erst Athena held her rites divine;

Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,

that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;

But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,

that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;

The hues of yough upon a brow of woe,

which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,

match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,

a rose-red city half as old as time.

It referred to Petra, the inaccessible city in the Ottoman eyâlet of Amman, which he had heard described but had never seen. He won an Oriel fellowship in 1846. He was much influenced by his brother-in-law, the scholar and theologian Henry John Rose (1800-1873), a conservative Anglican churchman with whom he used to spend his long vacations. Burgon made Oxford his headquarters, while holding a living at some distance. In 1863 he was made vicar of St Mary's, Oxford, having attracted attention by his vehement sermons against Essays and Reviews, a series of messages on biblical inspiration in which he defended against the findings of textual criticism and higher criticism the historicity and Mosaic authorship of Genesis and Biblical inerrancy in general: "Either, with the best and wisest of all ages, you must believe the whole of Holy Scripture; or, with the narrow-minded infidel, you must disbelieve the whole. There is no middle course open to you."

In 1867 he was appointed Gresham Professor of Divinity. In 1871 he published a defence of the genuineness of the twelve last verses of the Gospel of Mark. He now began an attack on the proposal for a new lectionary for the Church of England, based largely upon his objections to the principles for determining the authority of manuscript readings in the Greek New Testament adopted by Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, which he assailed in a memorable article in the Quarterly Review for 1881.

His biographical essays on Henry Longueville Mansel and others were also collected, and published under the title of Twelve Good Men (1888). Protests against the inclusion of Dr Vance Smith among the revisers, against the nomination of Dean Stanley to be select preacher in the university of Oxford, and against the address in favour of toleration in the matter of ritual, followed in succession. In 1876 Burgon was made dean of Chichester.

His life was written by Dean Edward Meyrick Goulburn (1892). Vehement and almost passionate in his convictions, Burgon nevertheless possessed a warm and kindly heart. He may be described as a high churchman of the type prevalent before the rise of the Tractarian school. His extensive collection of transcripts from the Greek Fathers, illustrating the text of the New Testament, was bequeathed to the British Museum.

He is also the only person to have an academic hood named after him, and in honour of this The Burgon Society is named after him.

Burgon In modern times

Today, the name of Burgon is known almost exclusively in connection with the Dean Burgon Society and the King James Only movement. (This is not the same society that is mentioned above, but a different organization.) This movement identifies itself with Burgon, perhaps to distance itself from allegations that the King James Only movement had its origins in the writings of Seventh-Day Adventist author Benjamin G. Wilkinson. While Burgon was outspoken about the Revised Version, and he maintained the position that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, his positions were not exactly the same as today's King James Only movement.

Publications

Apart from the sonnet Petra, Burgon's most notable work for which he is remembered today is The Revision Revised which was a critique of the then-new Revised Version (1881) of the Bible.

Unfortunately, the text of The Revision Revised is not available online, although the copyright has long since expired.

An OCR version is available online, but it has never been edited and the OCR process was very unsuccessful, making the text almost unreadable.

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• "WHAT DID JOHN WILLIAM BURGON REALLY BELIEVE ABOUT THE TEXTUS RECEPTUS AND THE KING JAMES VERSION?" is an attempt by Baptist researcher Doug Kutilek to reconstruct Burgon's original views.