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Thomas Harrison (translator)

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Thomas Harrison (1555, London – 1631) was an English Puritan scholar, a Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and one of the translators for the King James Version of the Bible.

Life

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He was born in London, and entered Merchant Taylors' School in 1570; he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1573 and graduated B.A. in 1577.[1] At Cambridge his scholarship attracted the notice of William Whitaker. He became a Fellow and tutor of Trinity College.[2]

Harrison was a puritan, and in 1589 is mentioned as attending a synod at St. John's College, along with Thomas Cartwright. He was a noted Christian Hebraist and among the revisers of the King James Bible. He belonged to the First Cambridge Company. For the last twenty years of his life he was vice-prefect of Trinity College.[2]

He died in 1631 and was buried with some pomp in the chapel of his college. A Latin volume in his honour was written by Caleb Dalechamp (Dalecampius) and dedicated to John Bois; it is titled Harrisonus Honoratus: Id est Honorifica de Vita, &c. (Cambridge, 1632), and contains a meagre outline of his life in the form of a funeral oration, with some Latin verses to his memory.[2][3]

References

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  • McClure, Alexander. (1858) The Translators Revived: A Biographical Memoir of the Authors of the English Version of the Holy Bible. Mobile, Alabama: R. E. Publications (republished by the Maranatha Bible Society, 1984 ASIN B0006YJPI8 )
  • Nicolson, Adam. (2003) God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins ISBN 0-06-095975-4

Notes

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  1. ^ DNB confuses him with a near-contemporary at St John's College, Cambridge. See "Harrison, Thomas (HRY573T)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. J. Andreas Löwe, ‘Harrison, Thomas (1555–1630)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 14 June 2009
  2. ^ a b c s:Harrison, Thomas (1555-1631) (DNB00)
  3. ^ DNB article on Bois.
Attribution