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John William Burgon
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John William Burgon (August 21, 1813 - August 4, 1888), English Anglican divine who become the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in 1876. He is remembered for his passionate defense of the historicity and Mosaic authorship of Genesis and of Biblical inerrancy in general. Burgon is also the only person to have an academic hood shape named after him.
on 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.
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Encyclopedia
John William Burgon (August 21, 1813 - August 4, 1888), English Anglican divine who become the Dean of Chichester Cathedral in 1876. He is remembered for his passionate defense of the historicity and Mosaic authorship of Genesis and of Biblical inerrancy in general. Burgon is also the only person to have an academic hood shape named after him.
Biography
Burgon 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. 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 poem Petra, referring to Petra, the inaccessible city in the present Jordan, which he had heard described but had never seen:
- It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
- by labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;
- But from the rock as if 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- that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;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 youth 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.
The poem is now chiefly remembered for the famous final line. (It is often referred to as a "sonnet," but the poem is well over 350 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. There was also an 1885 book containing the poem in somewhat altered form: "consecrates" becomes "sanctifies"; "deemed" becomes "call'd"; "But rose-red as if the blush of dawn" becomes "But rosy-red,--as if the blush of dawn," and so on.)
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, 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. Westcott and Hort lead 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.
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.
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. 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 on 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 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 of the Bible (1881), The Last Twelve Verses of Mark, The Traditional Text, and Causes of Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels.
Sources
External links
- Researcher Doug Kutilek reconstructs Burgon's original views.
- at CCEL.
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