Norman McLean (2 October 186520 August 1947) was a Scottish Semitic and Biblical scholar. He was born on 2 October 1865 at Lanark, the son of the Rev. Daniel McLean (1826–28), missionary to Jamaica and later minister of the UP church at Lanark, and Grace Whyte Millar of Loanhead (1831–1923). He was educated at the Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh, graduating MA in 1885. He entered Christ's College, Cambridge, taking First Class Honours degree in Classics (1889) and in the Semitic Languages Tripos (1893). He took the Prize in Biblical Hebrew. In 1894, he became a Fellow and lecturer of Hebrew in Christ's and then university lecturer in Aramaic (1903–31). He was a Tutor from 1911, and then Master of Christ's from 1927 to 1936.Christ's College Cambridge
Masters of Christ's College since 1505
/ref> Ill-health forced him to turn down the Vice-Chancellor's post. Responsible for a number of academic works, he spent forty years working on an edition of the Septuagint. His life work lay within a field that philologically-equipped theologians had pursued relentlessly since the seventeenth century: the establishment of a complete

variorum A variorum, short for ''(editio) cum notis variorum'', is a work that collates all known variants of a text. It is a work of textual criticism, whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual deci ...

edition of the scriptural texts. McLean, whose background was devoutly Presbyterian, spent forty years working on an edition of the Septuagint. He was elected FBA in 1934. He was a member of the

Cambridge Apostles The Cambridge Apostles (also known as ''Conversazione Society'') is an intellectual society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who became the first Bishop of Gibraltar.W. C. Lubenow, ''The Ca ...

, a secret society, from 1888. In 1896 he married Grace Luce on Malmesbury; there were no children. McLean is buried in the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, with his wife Mary, née Luce, who died in 1905.

References

* * W. A. L. Elmslie, ‘McLean, Norman (1865–1947)’, rev. R. S. Simpson, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 201
accessed 6 March 2013

External links

* 1865 births 1947 deaths Scottish scholars and academics British biblical scholars Masters of Christ's College, Cambridge Fellows of the British Academy Alumni of the University of Edinburgh {{Scotland-academic-bio-stub