Edwin Hatch - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

EDWIN HATCH (1835-1889), English theologian, was born at Derby on the 14th of September 1835, and was educated at King Edward's school, Birmingham, under James Prince Lee, afterwards bishop of Manchester. He had many struggles to pass through in early life, which tended to discipline his character and to form the habits of severe study and the mental independence for which he came to be distinguished. Hatch became scholar of Pembroke College, Oxford, took a second-class in classics in 1857, and won the Ellerton prize in 1858. He was professor of classics in Trinity College, Toronto, from 1859 to 1862, when he became rector of the high school at Quebec. In 1867 he returned to Oxford, and was made vice-principal of St Mary Hall, a post which he held until 1885. In 1883 he was presented to the living of Purleigh in Essex, and in 1884 was appointed university reader in ecclesiastical history. In 1880 he was Bampton lecturer, and from 1880 to 1884 Grinfield lecturer on the Septuagint. In 1883 the university of Edinburgh conferred on him the D.D. degree. He was the first editor of the university official Gazette (1870), and of the Student's Handbook to the University. A reputation acquired through certain contributions to the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities was confirmed by his treatises On the Organization of the Early Christian Churches (1881, his Bampton lectures), and on The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages on the Christian Church (the Hibbert lectures for 1888). These works provoked no little criticism on account of the challenge they threw down to the high-church party, but the research and fairness displayed were admitted on all hands. The Bampton lectures were translated into German by Harnack. Among his other works are The Growth of Church Institutions (1887); Essays in Biblical Greek (1889); A Concordance to the Septuagint (in collaboration with H. A. Redpath); Towards Fields of Light (verse, 1889); The God of Hope (sermons with memoir, 1890). Hatch died on the 10th of November 1889.

An appreciation by W. Sanday appeared in The Expositor for February 1890.