Thomas Harrison (1555,

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

– 1631) was an English

Puritan The Puritans were English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who sought to rid the Church of England of what they considered to be Roman Catholic practices, maintaining that the Church of England had not been fully reformed and should b ...

scholar, a Vice-Master of

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

, and one of the

translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''trans ...

s for the

King James Version of the Bible The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version (AV), is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, b ...

Life

He was born in London, and entered Merchant Taylors' School in 1570; he entered

, in 1573 and graduated B.A. in 1577. At Cambridge his scholarship attracted the notice of William Whitaker. He became a Fellow and tutor of Trinity College. :s:Harrison, Thomas (1555-1631) (DNB00) 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 A Christian Hebraist is a scholar of Hebrew texts who approaches the works from a Christian perspective. The main area of study is the Hebrew text of the Bible (known as the Old Testament to Christians and as the Tanakh to Jews), but Christians ha ...

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. 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 John Bois (sometimes spelled Boys or "Boyse") (5 January 1560 – 14 January 1643) was an English scholar, remembered mainly as one of the members of the translating committee for the Authorized Version of the Bible. Life Bois was born in Nettl ...

; 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.DNB article on Bois.

References

* 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

Notes

;Attribution * 1555 births 1631 deaths Writers from London Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge 16th-century Puritans 17th-century English Puritans Translators of the King James Version Christian Hebraists 17th-century English translators Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge {{UK-translator-stub