15 April 2021
Rollock’s commentary on Ephesians earned him the praise not only of Theodore Beza but of the wider world of Reformed communities.
His commentary was his first link to Geneva and thereby the broader international Reformed literature. Beza’s praise is well known: “I pray you, taken it to be spoken without flattery or partiality, that I never read or met with anything in this kind of interpretation more pithily, more elegantly, and so judiciously written: so as I could not contain myself, but must needs give thanks, as I ought, unto God, for this so necessary and so profitable a work.”
Translated by Casey Carmichael
Robert Rollock (1555–1599) was the first principal of the University of Edinburgh. He was appointed on several occasions to committees of presbytery and assembly on pressing ecclesiastical business. He was elected moderator of the General Assembly held at Dundee in May 1597. In 1598 he was translated to the parish church of the Upper Tolbooth, Edinburgh, and immediately thereafter to that of the Grey Friars (then known as the Magdalen Church). He died in Edinburgh on the 8th of February 1599.
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