Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Moulton, James Hope
MOULTON, JAMES HOPE (1863–1917), classical and Iranian scholar and student of Zoroastrianism, the elder son of the Rev. William Fiddian Moulton [q.v.], head master of the Leys School, Cambridge, by his wife, Hannah, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Hope, was born at Richmond, Surrey, 11 October 1863. His father was one of four brothers, all eminent, the best known being John Fletcher Moulton, Lord Moulton [q.v.]. He was educated at the Leys School, and at King's College, Cambridge, of which he was a fellow from 1888 to 1894. Several lines of Methodist ancestry blended in him, and he entered the Wesleyan ministry in 1886, being appointed assistant to his father at the Leys. In 1890 he married Eliza Keeling Osborn, granddaughter of Dr. George Osborn [q.v.]. He had two sons (the elder fell in action in 1916) and two daughters. He left Cambridge in 1902 on his appointment as New Testament tutor at the Wesleyan College, Didsbury, Manchester. In 1908 he was appointed Greenwood professor of Hellenistic Greek and Indo-European philology in the university of Manchester. After his wife's death in 1915, he went to India specially to lecture to the Parsees on Zoroastrianism, and to qualify himself to write a volume, which was posthumously published (1917) under the title The Treasure of the Magi. He left India in March 1917 and joined Dr. Rendel Harris at Port Said. Their ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. Moulton ‘played a hero's part in the boat’, died from exhaustion on 7 April, and was buried by his friend at sea.
Moulton's interests were wide, but his best work was done on the Greek of the New Testament and on Zoroastrianism. To the former he was drawn by the fact that his father, who had translated Winer's Grammar of New Testament Greek, had chosen his son to collaborate with him in the writing of a new and independent work under that title. Nothing had been done when the father died in 1898, and the whole responsibility fell on the son. He was himself spared only to see the publication (1906) of the first volume containing the Prolegomena; but the greater part of the second volume had been written and the work is in course of publication under the editorship of Mr. W. F. Howard. The Prolegomena was immediately recognized as of the first importance. In his Bibelstudien Deissmann had published a mass of evidence to show that the vocabulary of the New Testament did not belong to a class by itself, but was to be put in the same category as the ordinary spoken Greek of the time, as preserved in the non-literary papyri. Moulton accepted his demonstration and applied it to the grammar. Harnack spoke of him as ‘the foremost expert in New Testament Greek’. He hoped to prepare for English readers an edition of Deissmann's projected lexicon; and he lived long enough to see the publication (1914–1915) of two fasciculi of the Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, which he prepared in collaboration with Professor George Milligan. The most serious loss occasioned by his premature death was his failure to write the volume on the syntax in his Grammar of New Testament Greek.
His study of comparative philology led him to Sanskrit and Iranian; and from the language of the Avesta he naturally passed to the religion. In this field he owed much to the teaching of Edward Byles Cowell [q.v.]. Apart from articles, he published four books on the religion. Early Religious Poetry of Persia (1911) was an admirable introduction to the subject, and with it may be coupled The Teaching of Zarathushtra (1917), lectures delivered to the Parsees. His most important contribution was made in his Hibbert lectures, Early Zoroastrianism (1913). He was inclined to push back the date of Zarathushtra several generations behind the traditional date, 660–583 B.C.; and he sought to disengage the true Zoroastrian elements in the Avesta from accretions which he attributed to the Magi. The subject is discussed again in the first part of The Treasure of the Magi, the latter part of which is devoted to modern Parsism. Moulton was an enthusiast for Zarathushtra, and for his teaching, which he regarded as the purest form of non-biblical religion.
Though a scholar of the highest quality and exceptional range he was deeply interested in practical questions. Foreign missions, social amelioration at home, the commendation to doubters of the simple Christian faith in which he rested, were always very near his heart. He was eminent for the strength, the loftiness, and beauty of his character, and for the intensity of his religion.
[W. Fiddian Moulton, Memoir, 1919; James Hope Moulton, 1863–1917, in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, vol. iv, No. 1 (also printed in separate form); personal knowledge.]