Adam Clarke

Adam Clarke was born at Moybeg, in County Londonderry, Ireland, about 1760, his father said 1762, and the exact year has never been settled. His father was a schoolmaster; the family was poor. As a boy Clarke was thought slow. He learned to read late, and then read everything he could reach.

He was converted among the Methodists in 1778, and in 1782 John Wesley himself sent him to the Bradford circuit in England. He was about twenty-two, with almost no formal schooling and a horse.

He spent the rest of his life as a travelling preacher, moving circuits every few years as Methodist rules required, Bradford, Norwich, the Channel Islands, Dublin, Manchester, Liverpool, London. He was elected president of the British Methodist Conference three times, in 1806, 1814, and 1822, an honor almost never repeated in that era.

And all along he studied. Clarke taught himself Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, Arabic, Persian, Samaritan, Coptic, and more, and became one of the finest oriental scholars in Britain without ever holding a university chair. The government hired him: for years he worked for the Records Commission on Rymer's Foedera, the great collection of English state papers, and he catalogued manuscripts for private libraries. He was elected to the Royal Irish Academy and the Society of Antiquaries.

The work he is known for took forty years. The Holy Bible... with a Commentary and Critical Notes was published in eight volumes between 1810 and 1826. It is enormous, digressive, and packed with material nobody else was supplying to English readers, Hebrew and Arabic parallels, ancient customs, natural history, textual notes, and long excursions on whatever caught his eye. It became the standard theological resource of Methodism for the better part of two centuries, and it is still consulted.

He was open about where he broke ranks. Clarke denied the eternal sonship of Christ: he held the Son to be fully and eternally divine, but taught that the title "Son" describes the incarnation rather than an eternal relation. Methodists argued with him about it in his lifetime and long after, and Methodist doctrine did not follow him there. He also read the tempter of Genesis 3 as a creature more like an ape than a serpent, a reading nearly everyone else rejected. The commentary carries these views plainly, and readers have always had to weigh them.

He gave himself away in other directions too. He worked for the early Bible society movement, championed the Sunday school, organized mission work in the Shetland Isles, and gave away most of what he earned.

He died of cholera in London on August 26, 1832, during the epidemic that swept Britain that year, still working.

Sources: Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible... with a Commentary and Critical Notes; J. B. B. Clarke, ed., An Account of the Infancy, Religious and Literary Life of Adam Clarke, LL.D.; Luke Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley; the Dictionary of National Biography (1887)"Clarke, Adam."