Cyprian Thomas Rust

Cyprian Thomas Rust (1808–1895), was an English cleric and Hebrew scholar.

Rust was born at Stowmarket, Suffolk, on 25 March 1808, the son of Thomas Rust (1774–1842),a leading tradesman and a prominent member of the Baptist Congregation in Stowmarket, and Ann Bridge (d. 1810), and was educated in a boarding school at Halesworth. He was placed while a youth with a Messrs Spooner, Loggatt & Co, woollen merchants. His leisure, however, was occupied with linguistic studies, and he arranged in parallel columns, for comparative purposes, translations of the Scriptures in Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Syriac.

Rust joined the Baptist Church worshipping in Salem Chapel, Soho, and was baptised by John Stevens, the pastor, 30 June 1831. About 1836 he began to preach in various rooms and small chapels in the London suburbs, together with some other young men who devoted themselves on Sundays to this work. He entered the Particular Baptist ministry in 1837, and about this time married Elizabeth Maria Warren (1808–1887), the only daughter of the late John Willing Warren, the author of Ten Thousand a Year. There was one son, John Cyprian Rust, to the union. He became a Baptist preacher in London, and in 1838 was ordained pastor of the baptist chapel, Eld Lane, Colchester. In 1842 he resigned his pastorate on account of ill health, but remained at Colchester, taking literary and occasional Ministerial work, till 1849. In 1849 he joined the communion of the church of England, and entered Queens' College, Cambridge, where he graduated LL.B. in 1856.

He had previously been licensed to the perpetual curacy of St. Michael at Thorn, Norwich, and in 1860 he was presented by John Thomas Pelham, bishop of Norwich, to the rectory of Heigham. Its huge parish was subsequently divided into three, and Rust chose for himself the newly constituted parish of Holy Trinity, South Heigham, to the rectory of which he was admitted on 2 April 1868. During the time of his residence at Norwich, he took an active part in most of the religious and philanthropic movements and societies which were carried on in the City. In 1875 he was presented by the Bishop to the Rectory of Westerfield, a small village 2 miles from Ipswich, where he remained till 1890. In that year he resigned under the Incumbents Resignation Act, and came to live at Soham, Cambridgeshire. He died at Soham, on 7 March 1895, in the house of his only child, John Cyprian Rust, vicar of the parish. He was buried at Westerfield on 13 March.

In the late 1890s he published a pamphlet setting forth the scope and negative character of "the Higher Criticism," which drew from William Gladstone an acknowledgment of its value. He devoted much time to the study of the Great and Little Massora in Buxtorf's Rabbinical Bible. He was a diligent student of Hebrew, and took an interest in the controversies raised by the Higher criticism. While he was a member of the Baptist denomination, he wrote several pieces in prose and verse for Zion's Trumpet, and in 1845 he was a chief contributor to the Colchester Christian Magazine, if not editor of it. He reprinted some of these early writings under the title of Fragments in Prose and Verse. From 1864 to 1866 or thereabouts he wrote many articles in the Christian Advocate and Review (Hunt & Co) which was then edited by the Rev. Robert Hindes Groome, afterwards Archdeacon of Suffolk.