Joseph White (orientalist)

Wealthy neighbours enabled him to pursue his studies at Ruscomb and Gloucester, and with support from John Moore he entered Wadham College, Oxford, as a commoner on 6 June 1765.

At the suggestion of Robert Lowth the delegates of the Clarendon Press entrusted to White the task of completing and issuing an edition of the Philoxenian version (more accurately, Harklensian) of the New Testament, for which Glocester Ridley had left materials, from two manuscripts which he had brought from the east.

From 1780 to 1783 he was occupied in preparing an edition of the Persian text of the 'Institutes of Timur,' of which a specimen was issued in the former year, while the whole appeared in 1783, at the expense of the East India Company.

In 1783 White, one of the preachers at Whitehall Chapel, was appointed to the recently founded Bampton lectureship for 1784, his subject being a comparison between Islam and Christianity.

He asked Samuel Badcock, an impoverished clergyman and newspaper writer, to write up one lecture and large portions of others, as a secret arrangement.

White in 1790 published an account of his literary obligations, maintaining that the bond was for help in a projected history of Egypt, of which work on Abd-el-latif was to be the first part.

[1] He had printed the text sixteen years before, but, not being satisfied with it, had presented the copies to Heinrich Paulus who issued the work in Germany.

Besides various pamphlets, in which he advocated a retranslation of the Bible, and proposed a new edition of the Septuagint, to be based on the Hexaplar-Syriac manuscript then recently discovered at Milan, he published in 1800 a Diatessaron or Harmony of the Gospels.