Charles Bigg

Charles Bigg was an English clergyman and church historian, born in 1840 and dead in 1908. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford, taught at Cheltenham College and was its principal, and served as rector of Fenny Compton before returning to Oxford. In 1886 he gave the Bampton Lectures, published as The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, a study of Clement and Origen that remained the English introduction to the Alexandrian school for two generations. In 1901 he became Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford and a canon of Christ Church, and held both until his death. His commentary for the International Critical Commentary, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude (T. and T. Clark, 1901), reads 2 Peter 1:4, the promise that believers become partakers of the divine nature, against the Greek philosophical and Alexandrian uses of the phrase and holds that Peter means a real sharing in God's life through His promises rather than an absorption into God. He also edited and translated Augustine's Confessions and The Imitation of Christ for the Library of Devotion. Sources: Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement, the article on Charles Bigg; the title page and preface of A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1901); The Christian Platonists of Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886).