Life[edit]
He was born at Eaton, near Norwich, on 24 August 1831. He was the second son of Robert Bensly and Harriet Reeve.
He was educated at first in a Baptist private school in Norwich[1] founded by the father of John Sherren Brewer. His school fellows included the headmaster's grandson Henry William Brewer, later a notable architectural illustrator, the clinician and physiologist Sydney Ringer and the architect Edward Boardman.[2]
He was educated at King's College London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge,[3] studied in Germany, and was appointed reader in Hebrew at Gonville and Caius College in 1863. He was elected Fellow in 1876; became lecturer in Hebrew and Syriac in his college; was made Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic in 1887; examiner in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in the University of London.
He was a member of the Old Testament Revision Company; and accompanied Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson on the 1893 trip to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt following the sisters' discovery there the previous year of a palimpsest of the Gospels in Syriac. Bensly, together with Francis Crawford Burkitt, played an important role in deciphering the text on this second trip.[4]
He edited The Missing Fragment of the Latin Translation of the Fourth Book of Ezra, discovered and edited with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge, 1875); contributed The Harklean Version of Heb. xi, 28–xiii, 25 to the Proceedings of the Congress of Orientalists of 1889; assisted in the editing of the Sinaitic palimpsest; edited IV Maccabees (to which he devoted twenty-seven years of labor), published posthumously (Cambridge, 1895); and edited St. Clement's Epistles to the Corinthians in Syriac (published posthumously; London, 1899).
Family[edit]
On 14 August 1860 in Halle, Bensly married Agnes Dorothee, daughter of Baron Eduard von Blomberg, who, with three children, survived him. His eldest son, Edward von Blomberg Bensly (born 1863),[5] was professor of Classics at the University of Adelaide[1] in the years 1895-1905 and then professor of Latin at Aberystwyth College at the University of Wales.[6][7]
His wife Agnes wrote Our Journey to Sinai: Visit to the Convent of St. Catarina, with a chapter on the Sinai Palimpsest (published London, 1896),[8][9] the story of the couple's journey with the Gibson party in 1893.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the : Bendall, Cecil (1901). "Bensly, Robert Lubbock". In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography (1st supplement). London: Smith, Elder & Co.
