These two men were, Dr (afterwards Professor) F. J. A. Hort (1828 – 1892) a very aggressive personality, and his friend Professor (afterwards Bishop) B. F. Westcott (1825 – 1901), both of Trinity College, Cambridge. In doctrine they favoured the Romanising movement in their church, the ‘Larger Hope’ (of F. D. Maurice and Dean Farrar), the Darwinian hypothesis and the Old Testament Higher Criticism. They had been those who had turned from the Textus Receptus and had become infatuated with the Codex Vaticanus (B) and the other four oldest manuscripts Codices Sinaiticus (Aleph), Alexandrinus (A), Ephraemi (C), and Bezae (D). They had come to feel that these, being the most ancient copies of the Scriptures known, must be the most accurate. For some years they had been at work on a re-construction of a new Greek New Testament text on this basis.
The Vaticanus, the Sinaiticus and the Bezae codices, Dean Burgon considered the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders, and intentional perversions of truth, which are discoverable in any known copies of the Word of God. Like many scholars before him, he became convinced that these manuscripts survived, only because they were full of mistakes and little used.
Dean Burgon in his classic, the Revision Revised, deals with several hundred omissions and alterations Westcott and Hort made in their Greek New Testament.
“Shame — yes, shame on the learning” the Dean exclaimed “on the learning which comes abroad only to perplex the weak, and to unsettle the doubting, and to mislead the blind! Shame — yes, shame on the two thirds majority of well-intentioned, but most incompetent men, who — finding themselves (in an evil hour) appointed to correct ‘plain and clear errors’ in the English ‘Authorised Version’ — occupied themselves instead with falsifying the inspired Greek Text in countless places, and branding with suspicion some of the most precious utterances of the Spirit! Shame — yes, shame upon them!”
Extracts from “The Greek New Testament and The Modern Versions” by Bishop D. A. Thomson. (The Reformation Link, Dec. 1967 and The Bible League Quarterly, Jan.-March 1968.)
Let the Reformed Church in New Zealand and also all professedly evangelical bodies holding to the Westcott and Hort school take note !
W.M.