Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Cheyne, Thomas Kelly
CHEYNE, THOMAS KELLY (1841-1915), Old Testament scholar, the second son of the Rev. Charles Cheyne, a master at Christ’s Hospital and curate of St. Olave Jewry, London, by his wife, Sarah Anne, daughter of Thomas Hartwell Horne [q.v.], was born in London 18 September 1841. He was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, at Worcester College, Oxford, to which he came as scholar in 1859 after a short period at Magdalen Hall, and at Göttingen. He took a pass degree at Oxford in 1862, having, devoted himself to Hebrew and other subjects outside the usual course of studies; but he gained many university distinctions. After taking orders in 1864, he was appointed vice-principal of St. Edmund Hall, where he remained until elected to a fellowship at Balliol College in 1868. He was fellow of Balliol until 1882, and rector of Tendring, Essex, from 1880 to 1885. He joined the Old Testament revision company in 1884, on which he acted with a small band of critical scholars, including Andrew Bruce Davidson [q.v.], William Robertson Smith [q.v.], Samuel Rolles Driver [q.v.], and A. H. Sayce. In 1885 he was elected Oriel professor of the interpretation of Scripture at Oxford, and he held the professorship, with the canonry of Rochester attached to it, until 1908. His first wife, whom he married in 1882, was Frances, daughter of the Rev. D.R. Godfrey, fellow of Queen’s College. Oxford; she died in 1907. In 1911 he married Elizabeth, daughter of John Pattison Gibson. He had no children. He died at Oxford 16 February 1915.
The son of a clergyman, and the grandson of Thomas Hartwell Horne, the author of the celebrated Introduction to the Holy Scriptures, Cheyne was naturally attracted to the study of the Bible. He chose the Old Testament as his special field. Whether, had he remained in England, he would have held to the rigid conservatism which the controversies that raged about Samuel Davidson, Bishop Colenso, and Essays and Reviews, had done little to relax, it is impossible to say. But the teaching which he received in Germany made a decisive change in his attitude to biblical problems. Above all the stimulus he received from Heinrich von Ewald at Göttingen freed him from the restraining influence of tradition. Ewald was at the time the dominant authority on the language, the literature, the history, and the religion of Israel. His personality was stimulating and inspiring to an extra-ordinary degree, and his pupils were men of such outstanding eminence as Hitzig, Nöldeke, Schrader, Dillmann, and Wellhausen. His influence left deep marks on Cheyne’s early work, shown especially in his Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged (1870). Yet it did not enslave him, for as early as 1871 he had accepted, in spite of Ewald’s scornful rejection, the ‘Grafian’ theory that the priestly code was the latest of the four main pentateuchal documents—a theory adumbrated by Reuss and Vatke in 1834-1835, revived by Graf in 1865, defended and applied by Kuenen in his Religion of Israel (1869-1870) and carried to triumph by Wellhausen in his History of Israel (vol. i) in 1878.
Though he had predecessors, it is to Cheyne that the distinction belongs of initiating with adequate scholarship the critical movement in his native country. When he was barely twenty-eight, The Academy was founded and he was placed in charge of the biblical department. His own reviews were characterized by a maturity, a width of knowledge, a familiarity with the best continental literature, and a grip of critical principles, results, and problems, remarkable in one so young. The educational work thus begun was continued in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in a large number of books, among which special mention should be made of The Prophecies of Isaiah (1880-1881), Job and Solomon (1887), The Book of Psalms (1888), The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter (1891), The Founders of Old Testament Criticism (1893), Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (1895), and Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898).
Cheyne’s career, alike in criticism and religion, was of singular and, in its latest phase, of painful interest. In other respects than in his early adhesion to the Grafian theory, he was in the van of the critical movement. From first to last he probably adhered consistently to the principle, laid down in his first book, that ‘preconceived theological notions ought to be rigorously excluded from exegesis’. But in 1880 he became an evangelical, though of an individual type. ‘Johannine religion reasserted its supremacy over criticism and speculation.’ He did not abandon his critical position; but he combined faith with criticism, and was more concerned than before to make Scripture an instrument of edification. The sense that biblical criticism untouched by the apologetic interest ‘cramped the moral energies’ led him to a less uncompromising statement of results and a more considerate regard for the weaker brethren. But, as time went on, accommodation seemed less necessary, and his utterances became more and more outspoken. With this there went a tendency to more extreme positions, and a growing impatience, not perhaps untouched by scorn, with those who adhered to a more moderate attitude. More and more of the Old Testament literature was relegated to the post-exilic period. More serious still was the growing recklessness of his textual criticism. This crossed at last the boundary beyond which sanity ceases. He had undertaken, in collaboration with Dr. Sutherland Black, to edit the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1899-1903). In the second volume (1900) the ‘Jerahmeelite theory’ made its appearance in a comparatively modest form. It was omnipresent in his contributions to the later volumes (1901, 1903), and in all his subsequent Old Testament work. The writing of numerous articles on proper names had convinced him that many had been incorrectly transmitted; while Hugo Winckler’s theory of a North Arabian land of Musri caused him to attribute to North Arabia an exaggerated part in Hebrew history. The whole of Cheyne’s work on the Old Testament from this point has little value except for specialists. The development is one of the most tragic episodes in the history of scholarship.
Cheyne had a philological equipment of great range and high competence, a profound and intimate knowledge of the Old Testament, an amazing familiarity with the literature upon it, and a willingness to consider novel theories, however extravagant. He had a singular exegetical gift; his commentaries are marked by originality, sympathy, and insight, and delicate literary instinct. His command of the whole field saved him from the danger of isolating its individual problems. His theological position became in his later years more and more indefinite. His last work, The Reconciliation of Races and Religions (1914), was not concerned with the Old Testament, but was noteworthy for its sympathy with Babism and the Bahai movement. He still spoke of himself as an anglican Christian; but he considered most of the synoptic narrative, including the Crucifixion, to be open to the gravest doubt. It may accordingly be questioned whether at the end he could be regarded as a Christian in any tenable sense of that elastic term; but at least his heart was set on the highest things, and in a world tortured by the strife of nations and distracted by the conflict of religions he cherished the vision of unity and peace.
[A. S. Peake in Expository Times, vol. vi, 1894-1895; G. A. Cooke in Expositor, May 1915; R. H. Charles in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. vii, 1915-1916. There is much autobiographical matter in the prefaces to many of Cheyne’s books.]