John Burgon

John William Burgon

John William Burgon^[1] (21 August 1813 – 4 August 1888) was an English Anglican divine who became the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in 1876. He is remembered for his passionate defence of the historicity and Mosaic authorship of Genesis and of Biblical inerrancy in general.

Biography

Burgon was born at Smyrna, the son of an English merchant trading in Turkey who was also a skilled numismatist and afterwards became an assistant in the antiquities department of the British Museum.^[2] His mother is often said to have been Greek but was in fact the daughter of the Austrian consul at Smyrna and his English wife.^[3]

During his first year the family moved to London, where he was sent to school. After a few years of business life, working in his father's counting-house,^[4] Burgon went to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1841, and took his degree in 1845.^[2]

The same year he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem Petra, referring to Petra, the then-inaccessible city in the present Jordan, which he had heard described but had never seen. An excerpt describing the buildings has often been reprinted:

The poem is now chiefly remembered for the famous final line above, which quotes the phrase "half as old as time" from Samuel Rogers.^[5] (This fourteen-line excerpt is often referred to as a "sonnet," but the poem is 370 lines long, in rhymed couplets. Burgon published it, apparently in a small pamphlet, around 1845. A "Second Edition" "To Which a Few Short Poems Are Now Added," was published in 1846;^[6] the text above follows it. It contained some revisions: "sanctifies" had been "consecrates"; "call'd" had been "deemed"; "But rosy-red,—as if the blush of dawn" had been "But rose-red as if the blush of dawn", and so on. There was also an 1885 book containing the poem.)

Hugh Kenner commented on the precision of Burgon's language:

Though romantic, Burgon was being workmanlike. To his generation the age of Time was quite definite; for since Adam was created in the year 4004 B.C. on 23 October, Time in the year Burgon wrote, 1845, was exactly 5849 years old, going back through half of which we locate the founding of Petra at 1080 B.C.^[7]

Burgon was elected to 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 the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, having attracted attention by his vehement sermons against Essays and Reviews,^[2] 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 then 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.^[2] Westcott and Hort led the team producing the Revised Version of the Bible. Burgon assailed Westcott & Hort in a memorable 1881 article in the Quarterly Review, and collected his Quarterly Review articles and pamphlets into books, such as "The Revision Revised", in which he denounced Westcott and Hort for elevating "one particular manuscript,—namely the Vatican Codex (B), which, for some unexplained reason, it is just now the fashion to regard with superstitious deference". He found their primary manuscript to be "the reverse of trustworthy."

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 the Dean of Chichester.^[2][8]

His life was written by 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.^[2]

Burgon in modern times

Today, the name of Burgon is known almost exclusively in connection with the Dean Burgon Society^[9] and the King-James-Only Movement. However, while Burgon was outspoken about the Revised Version and 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.

Another society which takes the Burgon name is the Burgon Society, which was founded to promote the use and study of academical dress, named so because Burgon is the only person to have a hood shape named after him.

Publications

Apart from the poem Petra, Burgon's most notable works for which he is remembered today are The Revision Revised which was a critique of the then-new Revised Version of the Bible (1881),^[10] The Last Twelve Verses of Mark,^[11] The Traditional Text, and Causes of Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels.^[12]

Notes and references

External links

• Works by John Burgon at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about John Burgon at Internet Archive
• "John William Burgon, late dean of Chichester : a biography with extracts from his letters and early journals, Vol. 1" by Edward Meyrick Goulburn, 1892
• "John William Burgon, late dean of Chichester : a biography with extracts from his letters and early journals, Vol. 2" by Edward Meyrick Goulburn, 1892
• "What did John William Burgon really believe about the Textus Receptus and the King James Version?" Researcher Doug Kutilek reconstructs Burgon's original views.
• The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels at CCEL.
• The Revision Revised (London 1883).
• Memorandum relating to the parish of Houghton Conquest in Bedfordshire. First published 1903–1904 in the Houghton Conquest Parish Magazine, Edited by Herbert W. Macklin.