Featured Books on Textual Criticism

Awesome collection. I'm jealous!

 

Now on to John William Burgon (1813-1888; often called "Dean Burgon" by Americans for some strange reason). He was bombastic and hard to follow, but the first major defender of the traditional text of the NT (also called Byzantine or Majority). The Dean Burgon Society (DBS) has reprinted a number of Burgon's works and done us a service, though they don't really follow him is some important ways.

First of all, The Revision Revised (1883) is said by the author to be a reprint of three articles (very long "articles"): "The New Greek Text," "The New English Version," and "Westcott and Hort's New Textual Theory." The book is the first major refutation of the theories of Westcott and Hort, and the first ever objection to what I would call the "modern version" era in its opposition to the English Revised Version (the American Standard Version in the States).

This book is important for anyone studying textual criticism, especially the history of the discipline. It provides a needed counterpoint to Westcott and Hort's two volume Greek NT and the theory they espoused. It also fed the opposition by modern authors to the critical text, beginning perhaps with the writings of Edward F. Hills.

 

Another book by Burgon, edited by his disciple Edward Miller after Burgon's death, is The Traditional Text of the Gospels, with the subtitle "Vindicated and Established." This book has 239 pages of text, with seven helpful appendixes with Burgon's views on some key passages, manuscripts, and ancient versions.

My copy, reprinted by the DBS, also adds at the end a 22 page pamphlet by D. A. Waite summarizing the book by Burgon. Waite does a pretty good job here IMO, stemming from his genuine ThD and PhD. If only he had stuck to the scholarship he started out with, instead of veering off into the KJVO movement, even selling the books of the often strange Gail Riplinger. (The DBS later repudiated this lady, alleging she had lied to them about her two divorces.)

Since this is shorter than The Revision Revised, it may be a better book for the reader to learn Burgon's method of textual criticism. Chapter II, "Principles," is especially interesting in this regard. The reader will learn that Burgon's method depended very much on quotes in the Church Fathers. He wrote, "The quotations of passages by the Fathers are proofs of the readings with they found in the copies used by them" (p. 23).

By the way, Burgon believed in verbal plenary inspiration. (See his book Inspiration and Interpretation, which I will not review here.) As a corollary of that, he believed in the divine preservation of Scripture. He writes in this book, "There exists no reason for supposing that the Divine Agent, who in the first instance thus gave to mankind the Scriptures of Truth, straightway abdicated His office; took no further care of His work; abandoned those precious writings to their fate" (p. 11). However, he would have rejected the "verbal plenary preservation" (VPP) of the DBS which was named after him. He continues, "That a perpetual miracle was wrought for their preservation--that copyists were protected against the risk of error, or evil men prevented from adulterating shamefully copies of the Deposit--no one, it is presumed, is so weak as to suppose" (Ibid.).

 

My favorite book by Burgon is The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (1871). This is the book that took me to the Byzantine priority position, although the works of Edward Hills got me started in that direction.

At 323 pages, this book may seem long to some since it is only on the ending of Mark, the longer ending being 16:9-20. However, Burgon does a very complete job, and I don't believe this book has ever been directly refuted. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

After the preliminaries, Burgon goes to his favorite source in Ch. III, "The Early Fathers Appealed to, and Observed to Bear Favourable Witness. Chapter IV appeals to the early versions, especially the Peshitta ("Peshito" in his lexicon). He goes on to refute the supposed "hostile critics" among the Church Fathers in Ch. V, and then finally gets to the manuscripts after that. I'll not go further in this review, but suffice it to say that this book is sine qua non for those researching the endings of Mark's Gospel

 

If you are going to do that, why not start with the Byzantine???

 

Jay Green (Sovereign Grace Trust Fund, 1990) has published a book of Burgon's writings, An Introduction to Textual Criticism, Vol. 1, under the rubric "Unholy Hands on the Bible." However, the works mentioned above are chopped up, edited badly by Green. Therefore I do not recommend this book, except to access some of the lesser known works by Burgon, such as "The Woman Taken in Adultery," which is an essay defending the Pericope Adulterae of John 7:53-8:1–11.

There is a Volume 2 with the title Unholy Hands on the Bible, but it is just a comparison of several modern versions, not really about textual criticism as far as I can tell from the Amazon page. You can find such discussions any day of the week here on the BB!

 

Hills started out as a genuine textual critic, with his PhD dissertation on the Caesarean text type. He did defend the TR and KJV, but appears to have followed Burgon principally, judging by Ch. 5 in his book, Believing Bible Study: "Dean Burgon and the Traditional New Testament Text."

What I got out of Hills chiefly was the application of the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer to bibliology. I teach that as priests, we are responsible for preserving the Scripture--a doctrine of the human preservation of Scripture. We do this by textual criticism, translation, printing, memorization, etc.

Well said!

 

I would not call Edward Hills a KJVO. For example he wrote about "the march of the Traditional (Byzantine) text towards supremacy" (Believing Bible Study, p. 107).

 

I would call him KJVP. I think he would have been open to a new translation of the TR. I don't recall him harping on the modern versions as so many do.

 

I've got two more from the early part of the 20th century. First of all is The Text and Canon of the New Testament, by Scottish scholar Alexander Souter (1873-1949), written in 1913. I have the 2nd ed. from 1954). If you've heard that name before in connection with Greek studies, it's because he also wrote A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament, a very handy little dictionary.

This is just a general guide, not very technical. He was excited about Hort and Westcott's work, but did not take sides between Burgon and them, complimenting them both. He wrote about Burgon, "J. W. Burgon and F. H. A. Scrivener did not publish recensions, but both did useful work in collating miniscule MSS., and Burgon also made a wonderful collection of references to the New Testament quotations in the Fathers.... They were both, on the whole, defenders of the Textus Receptus, and Burgon's views found a vigorous exponent in E. Miller" (p. 93).

At the end of the book is a very interesting collection of quotes, and even lengthy sections, from ancient documents in Greek and Latin, with translations.

 

Lake

Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946) was a well-known liberal back in the day, involved very much in textual criticism. His first book was The Text of the New Testament, first published in 1900. My copy is the sixth edition from 1933, so you can see that the book had a long and useful history. Fortunately, you won’t find much of his theological liberalism in this little book, and there are some useful facts to glean.

The book is short, only 86 pages. In textual criticism it follows Westcott and Hort, though it does give other theories. He wrote, “Few claim that this theory is final, but the work of Westcott and Hort has been found to be, whether for agreement or disagreement, the point of departure for the critics who have succeeded them” (p. 71). He was certainly right about this!

He does mention Burgon and Scrivener, saying, “One school refused immediately to agree with the general outlines of the theory. These were the followers of Scrivener and Dean Burgon” (Ibid.). He then says, “With the death of Dean Burgon and of Prebendary Miller, Westcott and Hort’s school was left for the time in undisputed possession of the field” (p. 73).

There are four helpful appendixes, with the first being a discussion of the systems of notation used by Tischendorf and Von Soden. The others are lists of Greek and Latin manuscripts, and then a short list of helpful books.