The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-30 00:00:00

The late Canon Cureton, D. D,, F,R.S,

By the death of Dr Cureton the world has lost a ripe and
accurate scholar, and the Church of England an earnest and
laborious minister. On the 29th of May, 1863, he met with
a severe railway accident while returning with his family
from Eastbourne, from the effects of which he never reco-
vered; every improvement was followed by a more severe
relapse, and he finally sank at 1 o'clock of the morning of
Friday, the 17th inst., in the 56th year of his age,
William Cureton was born at 'Westbury, in Shropshire,
in the year 1808, and was the second son of Mr William
Cureton, of that place, He was educated at the Free Gram-
mar School of Newport, in his native county, whence he
proceeded to Oxford with a Carswell Exhibition at the age
of 18. He had intended to join the University as a com-
moner, but his father having died about this time, leaving
the family property much embarrassed, he entered Christ
Church as a servitor, in order that his mother might enjoy
tt4t.ftglred,e-efskifPet.rfeeGiti: \''.l;.ti this tkst 1p displayed
is i 4nspeitat,nee, aftetionate nature; ea practical good-
-, -
pesi Which charactellied him through life., lie was a dili-
gent student, and gradUated in 1830. He was ordained
deacon in 1831 by Dr;:Bagot, Bishop of Oxford, and . priest
by Dr Murray, BishOp'ef Rochester, in 1832. He took the ,
degrecyl of BOcheldr and Doctor of Di Anityhy accumulation
in 1858,havink been.previously created Rector of Divinity
by an honorary diplopia of the University of ',Halle. • Dr.
qiiiitard,then'Dei.ti, of Christ Church, who, was , much at-
tached to him,made him a 'chaplain of his college, and in 1834
'introduced him to bi',Bandinel, the Bodlean Librarian, as a
- .-
good son and a fit person to be under-librarian. - He-con-
alined in that post untirlB37, when he succeeded Sit4zed.
Madden as aesistent'i keeper of the manuscripts in . the
British Museum. He Was selected for hilt office on account
of his special acquaintance with Oriental languages, parti-
cularly,Artabic, to. the study of which he had devoted him-
self from the year 1830,1 when he took his B.A. degree.
In the, British Museum Dr Cureton fetind emploYnient
suites to his tastes and studies, The dtiti assigned to him
was the preparation of a classed catalogue of the Arabic Por-
don of the collection... The first part of
.thts; work, com-
prising ChristionAyritings and the divisions of Mahomedan
' theology, jurisprudettoN and history, and in, which every
volume noticed was, minutely described; in Latin, was pub-
lished'in the spring of 1640. Much alao of the, material for
the retnaindei of the catalogue had been prepared by him
before the yeat%lBso,.wheikhe resigned' his appointment.
Bat the preparation Oftilits catalogie was not. the most
important norAhs most laborious of DiCiiKetort's duties, at
the British Museum. Akearly as the,year ,4344 his work
on ;the Arabic catalogue had been interrupted, through the
acquisition by tl4titisteVe,bf that institutiOn of a very re-
markable collection if manuscripts in the Sac language,-
obtained' thrOtigh4 the agency of IF, Tarn from .the
Monastery of-St/ Mtiri DOpara, in the7-eles4rt dg Nitria or
Scete,:nOt_far kopipPairo„; This eventf4rnished him with
materials fot,kreseaphes, at
.once varietp trd,-;profound, in a
neW ,ficid,,,pii,the arrivalgif the MBS,—thf,first portion
in 18.,41,,theaSPond'in 18434-he threw,:?iinitelt heart and
soul into fhfrelittidy, of the Syraic langukge*d literature.
Op hfni h;rilie ifrattitist4nocidevolved the task'6f classifying
'the voltne4bf*itharhig together, collatingiand arranging
the Otihtiplgati: frogniepta and loose leaves of -which the
Nitrian:CollectionicOusisted, and of drawing up., a brief
suiumari of heir coident# for the catalogue-Of additional
MSS. n, die Muse*.
One nftliettgt results of these labours was an article in
'the Q*4.oi.Reiiiew; NO. cliii., Dectunber, 1815, giving
an account otille'iWaiiii Which the M6S-, were procured,
eild;fli rouglk? 400. Of :,their: contentr4 and in the same
year appeared ;the first edition of the ancient Syriac
version of the'Spistle of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp, the
Ephesiani, and the Thimans. The views propounded by
I,Dr. Cure;,onithat we have here .the genuine epistles of
St, Ignatius in t4eiebrjgbail for' )1 .;.' that the PreViously-
-kuwwil-riekeesion-s-ro,k bhest- t!..-rar., '4r:4:tins -kri, muck. altr,Pd
and interpolated ; and that all others ascribed to that
Father are suppositious—views such as these were cer-
tain to excite much controversy in the theological world.
Commenced by Wordsworth in the English Review, No.
viii., July, 1845, the strife was continued by Samuel Lee
(British Magazine, vol. xxx ), Bunsen, Baur, Hilgenfeld,
Denzinger, Het'ele, Jacobson, and others, of whom the firs
two supported Cureton, while the rest combated his views.
Cureton himself took the field against 'Wordsworth in his
" Vindiciae Ignatianaa" (1846)—a calm but crushing refu-
tation of his opponent's allegation
,that the Syriac version
was a miserable epitome by an Eutychian heretic." The
year 1849 saw the publication of the " Corpus Ignatianum,"
an enlarged edition of the work of 1845, almost contempo-
raneously with which appeared Petermann's edition of the
Ignatian epistles. Since then discussion has been continued
by Lipsius (1859) on the site of Cureton, and Marx (1861)
on that of his opponents, and is not even yet brought to a
final settlement. Cureton, however, remained steadfast to
the views stated with such clearness and learning in the
" Corpus Ignatianum," and would, if his life had been
spared, have once again stepped forward to sum and con-
clude the controversy.

While the Ignatian controversy was at its height Dr
Cureton edited the text of a portion of the Syriac version
of the long-lost " Festal Letters of St. Athanasius," of
which he had been the fortunate discoverer. The preface
to these letters contain an interesting account of the Nitrian
Collection, more especially of a third portion, which reached
the Museum in 1847. These letters have been translated
into English by Burgess (1854), and form one of the vo-
lumesof Pusey's Library of the Fathers. A German trans-
lation flora the pen of the well-known Syrian scholar
Larsow appeared in 1852.
In 1851 Cureton edited for the trustees of the British
Museum the palimps est fragments of the " Iliad of
Homer," contained in the Nitrian MS., now numbered
" Add, 17, 210."
In 1853 there issued from the University Press; of Oxford
an important contribution to our historical knowledge—the
third part of the " Ecclesiastical History of John Bishop of
Ephesus," edited by Cureton, from the Add. MS. 14,640.
Of this he intended to publish a translation, but other
labours prevented hfm, and his wishes were carried
out by the Rev. R. Payne Smith, sub-librarian of the Bod-
leian Library, whose version appeared in 1860. There is
also a German translation by Schonfelder (1862).
Two years later this indefatigable scholar published his
Spicilegium Syriacum," containing remains ascribed to
Bardesanes, Melito of Sardes, Ambrose, &c., with an Eng-
lish translation and notes. The first of these, called in the
MS. the "Book of the Laws of Countries," is the Syriac
original of the celebrated "Dialogue on Fate." A German
translation of it has been given by Marx, in his work " Bar-
desanes von Edessa" (1863), who has shown that it is in
reality the production of a disciple of Bardesanes named
rafMelito, but, as Ewald
treatise of that Father
Philip. The second tract contained in the " Spicilegium" is,
ainndall
Landprobability,
have
maintained,
no t the 'Ap olothg
Trap' tingle-lag. The third is the same, with some
modifications, as the Xdyor 7rp6s EXXqvas, which is
sometimes attributed to Justin Martyr.
_ _

In 1858 Cureton edited, perhaps, the most valuable of all
his works, and one which has given rise to scarcely less con-
troversy than the Ignatian Epistles, He discovered in the
Add. MS. 14,451, which belongs to the latter half of the
fifth century, the remains of an ancient recension of the
Syriac Gospels, differing notably from the ordinary Pehito
version. In his preface he dwelt on these divergencies,
more especially in the text of the Gospel of St. Matthew—
summed up the evidence in favour of the Hebrew original
of that Gospel, than which, perhaps, no fact relating to
the history of the New Testament is more fully and
satisfactorily established ; and endeavour to prove that
this particular MS. represented the Hebrew far more
faithfully than the Peshito does—at least in the shape
it is generally known to European scholars, His views
have been warmly espoused by that able critic Dr. Tregel-
les, It was Dr. Cureton's intention to have returned in
after years to this subject, and made known additional evi-
dence which he had collected upon these points.
Three years later Cureton brought out.the last work that
he was destined to finish—" The History of the Martyrs in
Palestine," by Eusebius of Cro3area, taken from the same
venerable MS. from which Dr S. Lee edited the Theophania
of that father.

The last years of his life were employed in completing a
work which he had announced in the pref ace to The Festal
Letters of St Athanasius, p. xxiii., note. The text and
part of the translation were printed at the time when he met
with the railway accident that ultimately caused his death.
Fortunately he was able to finish the translation and notes
before his health altogether gave way; but the preface, in
which the results of the work were to have been summed
up, and his views regarding various questions stated, has we
fear never been written. According to his own statement
the book contains, among other things, " a considerable por-
tion of the'original Aramic document which Eusebius cites
as preserved in the archives of Edessa, and various passages
from it, quoted by several authors, with other testimonies,
which seem to be sufficient to establish the fact of the early
conversion of many of the inhabitants of that city,and among
them of the King himself, although his successors after-
wads relapsed halo paganism,': The unwritten prelim