Alexander Roberts

Alexander Roberts DD (12 May 1826 – 8 March 1901) was a Scottish biblical scholar.

Born at Marykirk, Kincardineshire, on 12 May 1826, he was the son of Alexander Roberts, a flax-spinner. He was educated at the grammar school and King's College, Aberdeen, where he graduated M.A. in March 1847, being the Simpson Greek prizeman.

Roberts was a presbyterian minister (1852–71) in Scotland and London. In 1864, then a minister at Carlton Hill, London, he was made Doctor of Divinty of Edinburgh University. He was also minister at St. John's Wood, and was a member of the New Testament revision company (1870–84). In 1872, he succeeded John Campbell Shairp in the chair of humanity at the University of St. Andrews; he was made emeritus professor in 1899. He died at St. Andrews, Mitcham Park, Surrey, on 8 March 1901. He was returned to St Andrews for burial and lies in the south-east corner of the churchyard of St Andrews Cathedral.

Roberts married on 2 December 1852 Mary Anne Speid (died 18 January 1911), and had fourteen children, of whom four sons and eight daughters survived him.

Roberts' "Discussions on the Gospels" was published in 1862, one of a series of works in which he maintained that Greek was the habitual speech of Jesus, a conclusion unpopular at the time. He co-operated with Sir James Donaldson as editor and part translator of the English versions of ecclesiastical writers published as the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (1867–72, 24 vols.), the first major edition in English of these Church Fathers. He also translated the Works of Sulpitius Severus (1895) in the Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.

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