Geddes, ALEXANDER

Geddes, ALEXANDER, a biblical critic, translator, and miscellaneous writer, was born at Arradowl, in the parish of Ruthven, Banffshire, in 1737. His parents were Roman Catholics, and he was educated for a priest, first at Scalan, a monastic seminary in the Highlands, next at the Scots College, Paris, where he acquired a knowledge of Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Dutch. In 1764 he returned to Scotland, and five years later took a cure of souls at Auchinhalrig in Banffshire, where he remained for ten years. Here he made himself conspicuous by a breadth of sympathy with the Protestants around him, so extraordinary as to lead to his being deposed from all his ecclesiastical functions. The university of Aberdeen made him LL.D. Geddes now resolved to betake himself to literature, and proceeded to London in 1780. He had long planned a translation of the Bible into English for the use of Roman Catholics, and he was now, through the munificence of Lord Petre, enabled to devote himself to the work. The first volume appeared in 1792; the second in 1793, carrying the translation as far as the end of the historical books; and the third was issued in 1800, containing his Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures. These volumes, especially the last, are startlingly heretical, and offended Catholics and Protestants alike. They exhibit as thorough-going Rationalism as is to be found in Eichhorn or Paulus, eliminating the supernatural element from the Scriptures; such stories as that of the Creation in Genesis being merely poetical or philosophical fictions, and such figures as Moses merely men who by a pious fraud contrived to add a divine sanction to mere human wisdom. These opinions naturally enough exposed Geddes to the charge of infidelity. He died in London, 26th February 1802. His poems, even Bardemachia, are now of no importance. See the Life by Dr Mason Good (1803).