By Robert Petrovich

“What the Divine plan of his life is, man can only learn as he advances faithfully and adventurously along the path which is marked out for him by God, and which he can never be at a loss to know, if he but seeks to know it. But since the path is of God’s devising and not man’s, it follows that it must be one of high adventure, and one that is often beset with clouds and darkness. The life of the faithful man must, therefore, be one of constant discovery: on the one hand of the goodness and love of God, on the other of his own growing power and destinies.”
—R. H. Charles, Gambling & betting: a short study dealing with their origin and their relation to morality and religion, 1925

Robert Henry Charles (1855–1931) received a doctor of divinity degree from Trinity College and a doctor of letters from Oxford, was accepted as a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1919 was appointed archdeacon of Westminster. Charles began his education at a private school near his home in Ulster, Ireland, but was dissatisfied with the quality of instruction and requested to be transferred to Belfast Academy. He made rapid progress and soon entered Queen’s College, where he earned his B.A. (1877) and M.A. (1880) with first-class honors. During his undergraduate years at Belfast, he passed through a spiritual crisis that led him to seek ordination; accordingly, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, and there opened a brilliant career in classics and theology. He served as professor of biblical Greek at Dublin, as lecturer at Oxford, and as canon and, later, archdeacon of Westminster. But it was his rare work as a scholar of Jewish eschatological, apocryphal, and apocalyptic literature that distinguished him and brought him fame.

In 1880, at the end of his master’s courses at Queen’s College, Charles spent some time in Germany and during his stay at Heidelberg met the woman who would later become his wife. He was ordained a deacon in 1883 and a priest in 1884. During the succeeding six years he served curatorships in Whitechapel, Kensington, and Kennington with such zeal and energy that his health was seriously impaired and prolonged rest became necessary. With his wife he went to Germany for a year. It was during this visit that he began his study of religious developments within Judaism during the intertestamental period, particularly the exposition of the apocalyptic literature of that age. When Charles returned to England, he settled at Oxford and began the publication of a long series of works of first-rate importance. The series opened with an English translation of the Book of Enoch (1893) and was crowned by a massive edition of the Apocalypse of John or Book of Revelation in two volumes (1920) and a great commentary on the Book of Daniel (1929). In the intervening years he published masterly English translations, with reliable commentaries, of many apocalyptic works that had only recently come to light. To do so he made himself a master of the languages of the genre—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic—by years of industrious and concentrated study.

His knowledge was vast and accurate. His critical editions of the Book of Jubilees, Enoch, and Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs still stand as models of scholarship and remain indispensable for students. While pursuing his own researches with characteristic zeal, he gathered about him at Oxford a band of scholars with similar interests and abilities. The result of their joint labors was the two volumes of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (1913), in which, besides the general editorship, Charles contributed a large share of the detailed work. He had worked at and revised his own contributions to that collection—2 Baruch, 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, Martyrdom of Isaiah, Book of Jubilees, Assumption of Moses, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Fragments of a Zadokite Work—over a period of nearly twenty years. His Ethiopic version of Enoch was edited from twenty-three manuscripts with additional Greek and Latin fragments; his Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, from nine Greek manuscripts with Armenian, Slavonic, Hebrew, and Aramaic versions. Like the unequaled scholar of a later generation, Theodor Gaster, R. H. Charles produced excellent translations of scriptural texts newly come to light and believed it to be his duty as a scholar to present them to laypersons for their elevation.

Robert Petrovich, 2002