John William Burgon

The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels John William Burgon

The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels

Vindicated and Established

John William Burgon

A gospel, meaning "good news", is a written account of the career and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The word originally meant the Christian message itself, but in the 2nd century it came to be used for the books in which the message was set out. The four gospels of the New Testament -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- are almost our only source of information on Jesus, and thus occupy a uniquely important place in Christianity. They were all written in the period between c. 70 AD and the end of the 1st century, by anonymous authors, and stand at the end of a process of oral and written tradition that began on, or even before, the death of Jesus.

Textual Criticism of the New Testament is a close inquiry into what is the genuine Greek--the true text of the Holy Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles, of the Pauline and Apostolic Epistles, and the Revelation. Inasmuch as it concerns the text alone, it is confined to the Lower Criticism according to German nomenclature, just as a critical examination of meaning, with all its attendant references and connexions, would constitute the Higher Criticism. It is thus the necessary prelude of any scientific investigation of the language, the purport, and the teaching of the various books of the New Testament, and ought itself to be conducted upon definite and scientific principles. The object of this treatise is to lead to a general settlement of those principles. For this purpose the Dean has stripped the discussion of all adventitious disguise, and has pursued it lucidly into manifold details, in order that no employment of difficult terms or involved sentences may shed any mystification over the questions discussed, and that all intelligent people who are interested in such questions--and who is not?--may understand the issues and the proofs of them.

Indeed, these examinations have seemed to me, not only to carry back the Traditional Text satisfactorily to the first age, but to lead also to solutions of several difficult problems, which are now presented to our readers. The wealth of MSS. to which the Fathers introduce us at second-hand can only be understood by those who may go through the writings of many of them with this view; and outnumbers over and over again before the year 1000 all the contemporaneous Greek MSS. which have come down to us, not to speak of the years to which no MSS. that are now extant are in the opinion of all experts found to belong.