As Norris Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge from 1905 until shortly before his death, Burkitt was a sturdy critic of the notion of a distinct "Caesarean Text" of the New Testament put forward by B. H. Streeter and others.

He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1886: he was the 28th Wrangler that year.

[4][6] Burkitt accompanied Robert Bensly, James Rendel Harris, and sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith on the 1893 expedition to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt to examine a Syriac palimpsest of the Gospels discovered there the previous year by the sisters.

Burkitt played an important role in deciphering the text and in subsequent publication of the team's findings.

[7] Burkitt was a noted figure at Cambridge in 1912–1935 for his chairmanship of the Cambridge New Testament Seminar, attended by other prominent theologians, including Robert Newton Flew, who left an account of it in an obituary for Burkitt in the Proceedings of the British Academy.