John William Burgon

1813-1888. Anglican scholar and controversialist. Educated at Worcester College, Oxford, and thereafter fellow of Oriel, he became vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford in 1863, and dean of Chichester in 1876. An old-fashioned High Churchman, he was famous on three counts: as author of the very popular Lives of Twelve Good Men, a series of pungent sketches of High Churchmen of his age (1888); as an unremitting protagonist for the “Textus Receptus” of the NT, both against higher criticism* (cf. The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark Vindicated, 1871), and against the then new RV with The Revision Revised (1883); and as the loser in at least three major conflicts in which he violently denounced the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, vigorously opposed the appointment of A.P. Stanley* as a Select Preacher to the university in 1872, and severely criticized the Prayer Book Lectionary of 1872.