Charles Fox Burney

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Rev. Charles Fox Burney (4 November 1868-15 April 1925) was Biblical scholar at Oxford University, England.

Charles was the son of Charles Burney, Paymaster Chief RN and his wife Eleanor Norton, daughter of the Rev. W. A.Norton, rector of Alderton and Eye, Suffolk. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, and St. John's College, Oxford.

In 1893 he was elected Senior Scholar of St. John's and Lecturer in Hebrew and became a Fellow of St John's in 1899 and Vice President in 1900, 1906, 1910 and 1911. In June, 1914, Dr. Burney became the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture, and was also elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford in 1919. He published several works on biblical history. In “Israel’s settlement in Canaan”, he brought much new or newly-applied material especially from Babylonian sources to explain Israel’s early residence in Canaan, and a major contribution was the theory that Yahweh (Jehovah) was at an early period an Amorite deity. In “The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel” he attempted to prove that the Gospel according to St. John was a literal Greek translation of a Gospel written in Aramaic by a Jewish disciple, and this at least led to an accepted view that the author thought in Aramaic, and strengthened the probability that it was the work of an eyewitness

In 1913 at the age of 45 he married Ethel Wordsworth Madan (1891-1984) the elder daughter of Falconer Madan and his wife Frances Hayter. His daughter, Venetia Phair, is credited with proposing the name Pluto for the erstwhile planet.

[edit] Publications

• “Outlines of Old Testament Theology” (1899)
• “Israel’s Settlement in Canaan : The Biblical Tradition and its Historical Background,” (Schweich Lecture for 1917)
• “The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel,” (1922)
• “The Poetry of Our Lord.”