John Spencer (Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

John Spencer (1630–1693) was an English clergyman and scholar, Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. An erudite theologian and Hebraist, he is now remembered as the author of De Legibus Hebraeorum, a pioneer work of comparative religion, advancing the thesis that Judaism was not the earliest of mankind’s religions.

He was a native of Bocton, near Blean, Kent, where he was baptised on 31 October 1630. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, became king's scholar there, and was admitted to a scholarship of Archbishop Parker's foundation in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on 25 March 1645. He graduated B.A. in 1648, M.A. in 1652, B.D. in 1659, and D.D. in 1665. He was chosen a fellow of his college about 1655.

After taking holy orders he became a university preacher, served the cures first of St. Giles and then of St. Benedict, Cambridge, and on 23 July 1667 was instituted to the rectory of Landbeach, Cambridgeshire, which he resigned in 1683 in favour of his nephew and curate, William Spencer. On 3 August 1667 he was unanimously elected master of Corpus Christi College, a post he held for twenty-six years. He was appointed a prebendary in the first stall at Ely in February 1671-2, and served the office of vice-chancellor of the university in the academic year 1673-4, during which he delivered a speech addressed to the Duke of Monmouth on his installation as chancellor of the university.

He was admitted, on the presentation of the king, to the archdeaconry of Sudbury in the church of Norwich on 5 September 1667; and was instituted to the deanery of Ely on 9 September 1677. He died on 27 May 1693, and was buried in the college chapel, where a monument with a Latin inscription was erected to his memory. He was a major benefactor to the college.

In 1669 he published a 'Dissertatio de Urin. et Thummin' (Cambridge, 8vo), in which he referred those mystic emblems to an Egyptian origin. (See Urim and Thummim.) The tract was republished in the following year, and afterwards, in 1744, by Blasius Ugolinus in 'Thesaurus Antiquitatum.' He contributed verses to the Cambridge University Collection on the death of Henrietta Maria, queen dowager, 1669.

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