POOLE (POLE, POLUS), MATTHEW. — Puritan minister and biblical commentator, b. at York in 1624, d. at Amsterdam in 1679. Admitted to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1645, he received the degree of magister artium in 1652; he taught at Oxford from 1657. He became incumbent of St. Michael le Querne (London) in 1649, but resigned on account of the Act of 1662.
Known from 1654 as a puritan polemical writer, in 1666 he began his great work Synopsis criticorum aliorumque S. Scripturae interpretum (5 vols. fol., 1669–76), suggested by his friend W. Lloyd (later Protestant bishop of Worcester), whose prospectus also bore the names of 8 Protestant bishops and 5 continental scholars. The 2nd ed. appeared in Frankfurt in 1678, the 3rd in Utrecht (1684–86), the 4th in Frankfurt (1694), and there also the 6th in 6 vols. (1709–12), with a commentary on the Apocrypha added. The Synopsis was placed on the Index expurgatorius on 21 April 1693. P. also wrote Annotation upon the Holy Bible (up to Is. 58; a posthumous work completed by his nonconformist colleagues in 1683–85) and a polemical work on the Nullity of the romish faith (London 1666). Because of the terror aroused by T. Oates, he fled to Amsterdam. In his Synopsis, P. cites rabbinic and Catholic authors; he took very little from Calvin; nothing from Luther.