The Reverend F. L. Cross FBA
Born	Frank Leslie Cross (1900-01-22)22 January 1900 Honiton, England
Died	30 December 1968(1968-12-30) (aged 68) Oxford, England
Notable work	Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (1957)
Ecclesiastical career
Religion	Christianity (Anglican)
Church	Church of England
Academic background
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford Keble College, Oxford
Thesis	The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and His School[1] (1930)
Academic work
Discipline	Theology
Sub-discipline	Patristics
School or tradition	High-churchAnglicanism[2]
Institutions	Christ Church, Oxford

Frank Leslie CrossFBA (22 January 1900 – 30 December 1968), usually cited asF. L. Cross, was an Englishpatristics scholar andAnglican priest. He was the founder of the Oxford International Conference on Patristic Studies and editor (withElizabeth Livingstone) ofThe Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (first edition, 1957).^[3] He wasLady Margaret Professor of Divinity at theUniversity of Oxford from 1944 to 1968.

Cross was born inHoniton on 22 January 1900 to the pharmacist Herbert Francis Cross and his wife Louisa Georgina.^[4] The family moved toBournemouth whilst he was a child, where he won theDomus scholarship fornatural science atBalliol College, Oxford, takinghonours inchemistry andcrystallography and then, in 1922, following tuition atKeble College, Oxford, first-class honours intheology. He studied inMarburg andFreiburg im Breisgau, taking aDoctor of Philosophy degree at Oxford in 1930^[5] with a dissertation onEdmund Husserl. He became anordinand ofRipon College Cuddesdon in 1923 and was ordained in 1925 astutor andchaplain of that college.^[6] In 1927 he became one of the priest-librarians ofPusey House, Oxford, of which he became Custodian in 1934. He was appointedLady Margaret Professor of Divinity andCanon ofChrist Church, Oxford, in 1944, by which time his interest inpatristics was developing, alongside the beginnings ofThe Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, which was published in 1957. At the time of his death he was working on the second edition.

Post-war he organised international conferences, initially to re-establish relations with Christians inGermany. He organized the First International Conference on Patristic Studies in 1951, the second in 1955 and served as editor of the first 11 volumes ofStudia Patristica, the official publication of the conference.^[7] Additionally, he also organizedNew Testament congresses. As well as their academic importance, the conferences were an early expression ofecumenism.

Cross was awarded an OxfordDoctor of Divinity degree in 1950; he receivedhonorary degrees from theUniversity of Aberdeen and theUniversity of Bonn and was elected aFellow of the British Academy in 1967.^[8]

Cross died on 30 December 1968 inOxford. Near the end of his life his two sisters became his caretakers.^[9]

• Cross, F. L.;Livingstone, E. A., eds. (1997).The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN 978-0-19-211655-0.

• Brief biography of Frank Leslie Cross and introduction to the Cross Collection held by the National Library of Australia

• 1900 births
• 1968 deaths
• 20th-century Anglican theologians
• 20th-century English Anglican priests
• 20th-century English theologians
• Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
• Alumni of Keble College, Oxford
• English Anglican theologians
• English book editors
• Fellows of the British Academy
• Lady Margaret Professors of Divinity
• Patristic scholars
• Clergy from Bournemouth
• People from Honiton

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