Bigg was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (BA 1862, MA 1864).
In 1886, he delivered the Bampton Lectures, later published as The Christian Platonists of Alexandria (1886).
In 1900 he was invited by the Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, to a round table conference that produced The Doctrine of Holy Communion and its Expression in Ritual[1] in 1900.
After the death of Reverend William Bright, he was in April 1901 appointed Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford, holding the post until his death.
[2] In the earlier part of his life, Bigg produced school editions of Greek historians Thucydides (1868) and Xenophon (1880s).