Edward Lively

Cambridge made a notable contribution to Biblical studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the writings of its Professors of Hebrew and Divinity not only provided valuable aids for the better understanding of the Bible, but they also rank high as useful, accurate weapons in the struggle of the Protestants against the Church of Rome. A large share in the successful outcome of the religious controversy, apart from its political aspect, falls to Edward Lively, Regius Professor of Hebrew from 1575 to 1605, whose works ¹ and lectures were designed to vindicate the Reformers’ stand upon the Hebraica Veritas. ¹ He not only provided, as a skilful controversialist, adequate defence against Catholic attacks upon the English translation from the Hebrew original, but by his expert knowledge did much to further Hebrew studies in the last quarter of the sixteenth century in England. At that time the Protestant cause badly needed the support of the learned. Lively gave unsparingly of his time, energy and knowledge. Whilst all his writings, with the exception of his Commentationes in Martinium, reflect this burning heat of contemporary controversy, none does more so than his treatise On the Translation of the Ould Testament, in which he does for Hebraica Veritas what William Fulke of Pembroke did, a few years earlier, for the Greek New Testament in his A Defense of the sincere and true Translations of the holie Scriptures into the English tong against the manifolde cavils, friviolous quarels, and impudent slaunders of Gregorie Martin, one of the readers of Popish divinitie in the trayterous Seminarie of Rhemes. ²