It was as an undergraduate at Jesus that he was given his first literary commission: his tutor, Styan Thirlby, had him produce a translation of Eustathius for the notes to Pope's translation of Homer. Jortin was a clergyman who held a number of preferments, but his primary interest was in writing. He published some Latin verse and a number of religious tracts which critiqued Roman Catholicism and offered the most significant Anglican ecclesiastical history of the eighteenth century.