Robert Lubbock Bensly

Robert Lubbock Bensly (born in Eaton, Norwich, England, 24 August 1831; died in Cambridge, 23 April 1893) was an English orientalist.

Life[edit]

He was born at Eaton, near Norwich, on 24 August 1831. He was the second son of Robert Bensly and Harriet Reeve. He was educated at first in a Baptist private school in Norwich[1] founded by the father of John Sherren Brewer. His school fellows included the headmaster's grandson Henry William Brewer, later a notable architectural illustrator, the clinician and physiologist Sydney Ringer and the architect Edward Boardman.[2]

He was educated at King's College London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge,[3] studied in Germany, and was appointed reader in Hebrew at Gonville and Caius College in 1863. He was elected Fellow in 1876; became lecturer in Hebrew and Syriac in his college; was made Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in 1887; examiner in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in the University of London.

He was a member of the Old Testament Revision Company; and accompanied Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson on the 1893 trip to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt following the sisters' discovery there the previous year of a palimpsest of the Gospels in Syriac. Bensly, together with Francis Crawford Burkitt, played an important role in deciphering the text on this second trip.[4]

He edited The Missing Fragment of the Latin Translation of the Fourth Book of Ezra, discovered and edited with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge, 1875); contributed The Harklean Version of Heb. xi, 28–xiii, 25 to the Proceedings of the Congress of Orientalists of 1889; assisted in the editing of the Sinaitic palimpsest; edited IV Maccabees (to which he devoted twenty-seven years of labor), published posthumously (Cambridge, 1895); wrote Our Journey to Sinai: Visit to the Convent of St. Catarina, with a chapter on the Sinai Palimpsest (published posthumously; London, 1896); and edited St. Clement's Epistles to the Corinthians in Syriac (published posthumously; London, 1899).

Family[edit]

On 14 August 1860 in Halle, Bensly married Agnes Dorothee, daughter of Baron Eduard von Blomberg, who, with three children, survived him. His eldest son, Edward von Blomberg Bensly (born 1863),[5] was professor of Classics at Adelaide University[1] in the years 1895-1905 and then professor of Latin at Aberystwyth College at the University of Wales.[6][7]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b Bendall 1901.
  2. ^ "The Late Mr H W Brewer". The Norfolk News. 24 October 1903.
  3. ^ "Bensly, Robert Lubbock (BNSY851RL)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. ^ Soskice, Janet (2010) Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels. London: Vintage, 146 - 187
  5. ^ Barbara Wall, ed., PRG 88/7/1-122 Letters by Catherine Helen Spence to Alice Henry 1900-1910, State Library of South Australia, 2010.
  6. ^ Nick Harvey, Jean Fornasiero, Greg McCarthy, Clem Macintyre and Carl Crossin, eds., A History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide 1876-2012, University of Adelaide Press, 2012.
  7. ^ The University of Adelaide Calendar 1990-1991, Vol. 1, The University of Adelaide, 1992, p. 152.
Attribution

External links[edit]

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