William Cureton

William Cureton (1808 – 17 June 1864) was an English Orientalist.

He was born in Westbury, Shropshire. After being educated at the Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire and at Christ Church, Oxford, he took orders in 1832, became chaplain of Christ Church, sublibrarian of the Bodleian, and, in 1837, assistant keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum. He was afterwards appointed select preacher to the University of Oxford, chaplain in ordinary to the queen, rector of St Margaret's, Westminster, and canon of Westminster Abbey. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and a trustee of the British Museum, and was also honored by several continental societies. For a time Cureton also served as curate of St.Andrew's, Oddington, Oxfordshire.

Cureton's most remarkable work was the edition with notes and an English translation of the Epistles of Ignatius to Polycarp, the Ephesians and the Romans, from a Syriac manuscript that had been found in the monastery of St. Mary Deipara, in the desert of Nitria, near Cairo. He held that the manuscript he used gave the truest text, that all other texts were inaccurate, and that the epistles contained in the manuscript were the only genuine epistles of Ignatius that we possess, a view which received the support of Ferdinand Christian Baur, Bunsen, and many other eminent scholars, but which was opposed by Charles Wordsworth and by several German scholars, and is now generally abandoned. Cureton supported his view by his Vindiciae Ignatianae and his Corpus Ignatianum, a Complete Collection of the Ignatian Epistles, genuine, interpolated and spurious.

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