Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture

by C. J. Ellicott

This quotation, I may remark in passing, is not only useful in explaining when and where marginal notes were demonstrably needed, but also in showing how carefully such questions were considered, and how conscientiously the rules were observed under which our work was to be carried out.

Such were the textual labours of the Company. They were based on, and were the results of, the critical knowledge that had been slowly acquired during the 115 years that separated the early suggestions of Bentley from the pioneer text of Lachmann in 1831; and, in another generation, had become expanded and matured in the later texts of

Tischendorf, and still more so in the trustworthy and consistent text of our countryman Tregelles. The labours of these three editors were well known to the greater part of the Revisers and generally known to all; and it was on these labours, and on the critical methods adopted by these great editors, that our own text was principally formed. We of course owed much to the long labours of our two eminent colleagues, Dr. Westcott and Dr. Hort. Some of us know generally the principles on which they had based their yet unpublished text, and were to some extent aware of the manner in which they had grouped their critical authorities, and of the genealogical method, which, under their expansion of it, has secured for their text the widespread acceptance it has met with both at home and abroad.

Of these things some of us had a competent knowledge, but the majority had no special knowledge of the genealogical method. They did know the facts on which it was based—the ascertained trustworthiness of the ancient authorities as compared with the later uncial, and the cursive manuscripts, the general characteristics of these ancient authorities, the alliances that were to be traced between

some of them, and the countries with which they were particularly connected. This the majority knew generally as a part of the largely increased knowledge which the preceding forty or fifty years, and the labours of Lachmann, Tischendorf, and (so far as he had then published) Tregelles, had placed at the disposal of students of the Greek Testament. It was on this general knowledge, and not on any portions of a partly printed text, that the decisions of the Company were based; these decisions, however, by the very nature of the case and the use of common authorities, were constantly in accordance with the texts of Lachmann, Tischendorf, and Tregelles, and so with the subsequently printed text of Westcott and Hort.

Such a text, thus independently formed, and yet thus in harmony with the results of the most tested critical researches of our times, has surely great claims on our unreserved acceptance, and does justify us in strongly pleading that a version of such a text, if faithfully executed, should, for the very truth’s sake, be publicly read in our Churches.

That the Revised Version has been faithfully executed, will I hope be shown fully

and clearly in the succeeding chapter. For the present my care has been to show that the text of which it is a version, and which I have called the Revisers’ Text because it underlies their revision, and, as such, has been published by the Oxford University Press, is in my judgement the best balanced text that has appeared in this country. I have mentioned with it (p. 63) the closely similar text of the well-known Professor Nestle, but as I have not gone through the laborious task of comparing the text, verse by verse, with that of the Revisers, I speak only in reference to our own country. I have compared the two texts in several crucial and important passages—such for example as St. John i. 18—and have found them identical. Bishop Westcott, I know, a short time before his lamented death, expressed to the Committee of the Bible Society his distinct approval of their adopting for future copies of the Society’s Greek Testament Professor Nestle’s text, as published by the Würtemberg Bible Society.

I have now, I trust, fairly shown the independence of the Revisers’ Text, and have, not without reason, complained of my friend Provost Salmon’s estimate of its dependence

on the text and earnestly exerted influence of Dr. Hort and Dr. Westcott. Of course, as I have shown, there is, and must be, much that is identical in the two texts; but, to fall back on statistics, there are, I believe, more than two hundred places in which the two texts differ, and in nearly all of them—if I may venture to express my own personal opinion—the reading of the Revisers’ Text is critically to be preferred. Most of these two hundred places seem to be precisely places in which the principles adopted by Westcott and Hort need some corrective modifications. Greatly as I reverence the unwearied patience, the exhaustive research, and the critical sagacity of these two eminent, and now lamented, members of our former Company, I yet cannot resist the conviction that Dr. Salmon in his interesting Criticism of the Text of the New Testament has successfully indicated three or more particulars which must cause some arrest in our final judgement on the text of Westcott and Hort.