Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Gwynn, John
GWYNN, JOHN (1827–1917), scholar and divine, the eldest son of the Rev. Stephen Gwynn, rector of Agherton, Portstewart, Derry, by his wife, Mary Stevenson, was born at Larne 28 August 1827. He was educated at the Royal School, Inniskillen, and Trinity College, Dublin, of which he became a fellow in 1852. A refined classical scholar, he was warden of St. Columba's College, near Dublin, from 1856 to 1864. For the next eighteen years he worked as a country parson at Ramelton, co. Donegal, having been presented to the benefice of Tullyaughnish by Trinity College, and he became successively dean of Raphoe (1873) and dean of Derry (1882). In 1883 he returned to Trinity College, Dublin, as Archbishop King's lecturer in divinity, and in 1888 succeeded Dr. George Salmon [q.v.] as regius professor, a post which he held until his death, which occurred at Dublin 3 April 1917. He was serving the Church in the north of Ireland during the difficult period of the disestablishment, and he came into notice in the early days of the general synod as a conservative and moderate high churchman. But academic life provided the true sphere of his activities, and his association with the divinity school of Trinity College for thirty-four years was much to its advantage. He married in 1862 Lucy Josephine, the elder daughter of William Smith O'Brien [q.v.], the Irish nationalist, and had six sons and two daughters. His portrait by S. Purser is in the common room of Trinity College.
Gwynn set himself to the study of Syriac, as he used to tell, to relieve the tedium of long railway journeys from Donegal to Dublin; and he steadily became a master of the language. Within a few years he had contributed nearly forty articles to the Dictionary of Christian Biography, chiefly concerned with the early Greek and Syriac translators of the Bible; and in 1888 he wrote an erudite essay on the Peshitta version for the Church Quarterly Review. An important paper on Hippolytus and his Heads against Caius, in which these two persons were distinguished from each other, appeared in Hermathena (1888); and his discovery that the Syriac Pericope de adultera belongs to the Harkleian version, in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy (1888). These preliminary studies were crowned by the publication in 1897 of a new Syriac text of the Apocalypse, accompanied by an introductory dissertation and very full and careful notes. Gwynn's researches included also Remnants of the Later Syriac Versions of the Bible (1909). In short, he published all that now remains of the sixth-century Philoxenian version, and increased our knowledge of its successor, the Harkleian.
Gwynn's magnum opus was his superb edition of the Book of Armagh, an Irish manuscript of the ninth century, containing the whole New Testament in Latin, the Life of St. Martin of Tours, and some Patrician pieces, in Latin and Irish, of high importance for the history of early Christianity in Ireland. On this he had been at work for more than twenty years, and when it appeared in 1913 it was at once recognized as a masterly achievement. His infinite patience, his meticulous accuracy, and his sound judgement were notably illustrated by this fine book. And its welcome by scholars all over Europe was grateful not only to the editor, but to his many pupils and friends to whom he had endeared himself by his gracious courtesy and his kind heart.
[The Times, 4 April 1917; Abstract of Minutes of the Royal Irish Academy, 16 March 1918; personal knowledge.]