CHEYNE, THOMAS KELLY (1841-1915), Old Testament scholar, the second son of the Rev. Charles Cheyne, a master at Christ’s Hospital and curate of St. Olave Jewry, London, by his wife, Sarah Anne, daughter of Thomas Hartwell Horne [q.v.], was born in London 18 September 1841. He was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, at Worcester College, Oxford, to which he came as scholar in 1859 after a short period at Magdalen Hall, and at Göttingen. He took a pass degree at Oxford in 1862, having, devoted himself to Hebrew and other subjects outside the usual course of studies; but he gained many university distinctions. After taking orders in 1864, he was appointed vice-principal of St. Edmund Hall, where he remained until elected to a fellowship at Balliol College in 1868. He was fellow of Balliol until 1882, and rector of Tendring, Essex, from 1880 to 1885. He joined the Old Testament revision company in 1884, on which he acted with a small band of critical scholars, including Andrew Bruce Davidson [q.v.], William Robertson Smith [q.v.], Samuel Rolles Driver [q.v.], and A. H. Sayce. In 1885 he was elected Oriel professor of the interpretation of Scripture at Oxford, and he held the professorship, with the canonry of Rochester attached to it, until 1908. His first wife, whom he married in 1882, was Frances, daughter of the Rev. D.R. Godfrey, fellow of Queen’s College. Oxford; she died in 1907. In 1911 he married Elizabeth, daughter of John Pattison Gibson. He had no children. He died at Oxford 16 February 1915.
The son of a clergyman, and the grandson of Thomas Hartwell Horne, the author of the celebrated Introduction to the Holy Scriptures, Cheyne was naturally attracted to the study of the Bible. He chose the Old Testament as his special field. Whether, had he remained in England, he would have held to the rigid conservatism which the controversies that raged about Samuel Davidson, Bishop Colenso, and Essays and Reviews, had done little to relax, it is impossible to say. But the teaching which he received in Germany made a decisive change in his attitude to biblical problems. Above all the stimulus he received from Heinrich von Ewald at Göttingen freed him from the restraining influence of tradition. Ewald was at the time the dominant authority on the language, the literature, the history, and the religion of Israel. His personality was stimulating and inspiring to an extra-ordinary degree, and his pupils were men of such outstanding eminence as Hitzig, Nöldeke, Schrader, Dillmann, and Wellhausen. His influence left deep marks on Cheyne’s early work, shown especially in his Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged (1870). Yet it did not enslave him, for as early as 1871 he had accepted, in spite of Ewald’s scornful rejection, the ‘Grafian’ theory that the priestly code was the latest of the four main pentateuchal documents—a theory adumbrated by Reuss and Vatke in 1834-1835, revived by Graf in 1865, defended and applied by Kuenen in his Religion of Israel (1869-1870) and carried to triumph by Wellhausen in his History of Israel (vol. i) in 1878.
Though he had predecessors, it is to Cheyne that the distinction belongs of initiating with adequate scholarship the critical movement in his native country. When he was barely twenty-eight, The Academy was founded and he was placed in charge of the biblical department. His own reviews were characterized by a maturity, a width of knowledge, a familiarity with the best continental literature, and a grip of critical principles, results, and problems, remarkable in one so young. The educational work thus begun was continued in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and in a large number of books, among which special mention should be made of The Prophecies of Isaiah (1880-1881), Job and Solomon (1887), The Book of Psalms (1888), The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter (1891), The Founders of Old Testament Criticism (1893), Introduction to the Book of Isaiah (1895), and Jewish Religious Life after the Exile (1898).
Cheyne’s career, alike in criticism and religion, was of singular and, in its latest phase, of painful interest. In other respects than in his early adhesion to the Grafian theory, he was in the van of the critical movement. From first to last he probably adhered consistently to the principle, laid down in his first book, that ‘preconceived theological notions ought to be rigorously excluded from exegesis’. But in 1880 he became an evangelical, though of an individual type. ‘Johannine religion reasserted its supremacy over criticism and speculation.’ He did not abandon his critical position; but he combined faith with criticism, and was more concerned than before to make Scripture an instrument of edification. The sense that biblical criticism untouched by the apologetic interest ‘cramped the moral energies’ led him to a less uncompromising statement of results and a more considerate regard for the weaker
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