Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Sanday, William
SANDAY, WILLIAM (1843–1920), theological scholar, the eldest son of William Sanday, a well-known breeder of sheep and cattle, by his wife, Elizabeth Mann, was born 1 August 1843 at Holme Pierrepont, Nottinghamshire, where his family had been settled for more than a century. He was educated at Repton School from 1858 to 1861 and went up to Oxford as a commoner of Balliol College in 1862. but gained a scholarship at Corpus Christi College in 1863. He obtained a first class in classical moderations (1863), and in literae humaniores (1865), and was elected fellow of Trinity College in 1866. He remained there as a lecturer till 1869 when, having taken priest's orders, he left Oxford and held in succession the college livings of Navestock, Essex, Abingdon (1871–1872), Great Waltham (1872–1873), and Barton-on-the-Heath (1873–1876). Sanday was appointed principal of Hatfield Hall, Durham, in 1876, but was recalled to Oxford on his election in 1882 to Dean Ireland's professorship of the exegesis of Holy Scripture, a poorly paid chair which was made more acceptable by his appointment as fellow and tutor of Exeter College in the following year. From 1895 to 1919 he was Lady Margaret professor of divinity and canon of Christ Church. He was one of the original fellows of the British Academy (1903) and an honorary doctor of many universities. He married in 1877 Marian (died 1904), daughter of Warren Hastings Woodman Hastings, of Twining, Tewkesbury; they had no children. He died at Oxford 16 September 1920.
Sanday enjoyed an even academic life of thirty-seven years as professor, and spent nearly half a century in Oxford; his life's work, equally homogeneous, was dedicated to the scientific study of the New Testament and especially of the Gospels. He had no master, though his later development owed much to the influence of friends and fellow-workers, notably from 1883 to 1889 of Edwin Hatch [q.v.], and from 1895 to 1903 of Robert Campbell Moberly [q.v.]. His first books, The Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel (1872) and The Gospels in the Second Century (1876), already foreshadowed his mature method. He early evolved for himself a scheme of his life's work, proceeding by graduated stages through the ‘lower’ or textual criticism of the New Testament to the ‘higher’ or historical criticism, and so finally to a conception of the result as a whole. Under the first head falls his epoch-making claim for the close examination of the primitive Western authorities for the text, put forward in his Portions of the Gospels according to St. Mark and St. Matthew from the Bobbio MS. (1886) and in his Novum Testamentum S. Irenaei (posthumously published in 1923). The second of these works was produced in conjunction with one of the seminars of graduates meeting fortnightly during term, which he, as professor, had instituted. In some sense the Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1895), written in collaboration with Dr. A. C. Headlam, admirable in many ways as it is, meant an interruption to his central purpose, prompted by the feeling that a professor of exegesis should publish something exegetical.
Sanday wanted, at least from the time that he became Margaret professor, to concentrate his energies on writing a Life of Christ, and his later books are all of the nature of preliminary studies for the magnum opus, which in fact was never written and, so far as actual manuscript went, never even begun. Thus, he published successively Outlines of the Life of Christ (1905, reprinted from Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible), Sacred Sites of the Gospels (1903), Criticism of the Fourth Gospel (1905), The Life of Christ in Recent Research (1907), Christologies Ancient and Modern (1910), Personality in Christ and in Ourselves (1911), and in conjunction with his seminar, Oxford Studies in the Synoptic Problem (1911); books not all of equal value, but constituting in their sum a sustained effort to look at his subject from every side. Similarly, his later courses of professorial lectures illustrated his conception of the ‘praeparatio evangelica’ as rooted in the history of religion in the East, and not among the Jews only, far back in the centuries before Christ. As the result of advancing years, the pressure of controversy, and the distraction of the War, the magnum opus was practically dropped. His theological position as a modernist, advanced at some points, conservative at others, Sanday did not reach till 1912, and then for a time the scholar was merged in the controversialist (Bishop Gore's Challenge to Criticism, 1914; Spirit, Matter, and Miracle, privately printed, 1916; Form and Content in Christian Tradition, a friendly discussion [with the Rev. N. P. Williams], 1916, &c.). Just at first there may have been something a little impetuous or a little pontifical in his polemic: it was difficult for him to understand how people who adopted his conclusions on critical problems did not necessarily adopt the theological conclusions which had now become to him no less certain. With the outbreak of the War his activities found another vent. His political cast of mind was rather conservative (just as in his economic views he stood up for the middle classes), and the fighting services always had a curious fascination for him. So he threw himself with ardour into the business of a pamphleteer (The Deeper Causes of the War, 1914; The Meaning of the War for Germany and Great Britain: an attempted synthesis, 1915; In View of the End: a retrospect and a prospect, 1916; When should the War end?, 1917). Possibly he turned to these questions with relief because theological controversy was no longer congenial to him. At any rate his instinct for positive statement reasserted itself in a simple but finished summary of the results, as he saw them, of the critical study of the Gospels, The New Testament Background (1918).
Sanday held a unique position among English theological critics as the interpreter par excellence to Englishmen of the immense labour that was being devoted to the New Testament abroad. His best and most characteristic work was perhaps contained in the Life of Christ in Recent Research, which sketched the rise of the eschatological school of interpretation of the Gospels. He was acquainted with some of the most influential scholars abroad. His ideals were in some respects of a German rather than of an English type: he was wont to lament that Englishmen produced so much less that was conceived on an encyclopaedic scale than did the Germans. For many years he read almost everything that was written on his subject in German or English; over nine hundred bound volumes of pamphlets, given to the library of Queen's College, Oxford, attest his assiduity. And he not only read; he digested. He passed through the crucible of his own sane and cautious temper the whole voluminous mass, and criticized the critics. His was not in the strict sense an original mind; he made few striking discoveries of his own; he was slow in arriving at conclusions, though very tenacious of them when once reached; patient rather than nimble or acute, comprehensive rather than brilliant. Perhaps just for that reason his critical work was trusted on all sides. A French cardinal wrote after his death that he regarded himself as ‘in some sort Sanday's disciple’, while if there has been during the last generation a substantial measure of agreement among English students in their attitude to the critical study of the New Testament, that is perhaps due, more than to any other single cause, to the life's work and influence of William Sanday.
A portrait of Sanday by L. Campbell Taylor, painted in 1908, hangs in the house of the Lady Margaret professor; another, painted after his death from photographs, by C. H. Shannon, was presented by Mr. S. Sanday to Christ Church and hangs in the chapter house.
[The Church Times, 24 September 1920; Constructive Quarterly, June 1921; Oxford Magazine, October 1920; Expositor, November and December 1920; Expository Times, January–March 1921; Journal of Theological Studies, January and April 1921 (with bibliography); preface to the Novum Testamentum S. Irenaei; W. Sanday, Records and Reminiscences of Repton, 1907; Oxford Chronicle, 15 October 1909; personal knowledge.]