FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS
1998 TOPIC: Who was Dean John William Burgon? What did he do to defend our Bible?
(in 1000 - 2000 words)
CLOSING DATE: May 18, 1998 Postmark
"We believe that the study of this subject will prove profitable to our students. We have seen how clearly students have written in the past."
Further Details concerning Prizes, sources of information, etc. may be had by contacting:
High School Essay Contest
17829 Woodcrest Rd.
Hagerstown, MD 21740
THE GRACEWAY BIBLE SOCIETY presents the winners with beautiful leather Bibles. We are grateful to God for this opportunity to be part of this effort to encourage young people in Bible study and research.
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FIRST PLACE WINNER IN THE
THE 11th DAVID O. FULLER MEMORIAL ESSAY CONTEST
DAVID OTIS FULLER MEMORIAL ESSAY CONTEST
SPONSERED BY: Rev. & Mrs. Paul Reno
Hagerstown, Maryland USA
THE WINNER IS
Faith Esther Ferkel
OHIO USA
May 18, 1998
CONGRADULATIONS FAITH
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DEAN JOHN WILLIAM BURGON
"WHAT HE DID TO DEFEND OUR BIBLE"
HIS LIFE
Son of an English merchant, John William Burgon (1813-1888) studied at London University (1829-1830) before entering his father's business. In 1841 he enrolled in Oxford University,#1 receiving his B.A, M.A., and B.D. in 1845, 1848, and 1871, respectively. Burgon was appointed Gresham professor of divinity at Oxford in 1867, and appointed Dean of Chichester in 1876.#2 Burgon was a high-church Anglican#3 but opposed the ritualism into which the high-church movement was declining.
One of the greatest Christian scholars and linguists in history, John Burgon was a genius God raised up to defend the traditional text found in the vast majority of Greek New Testament manuscripts. During all of his active life he was accumulating notes and research data to establish this text as the historically authentic and proven Word of God.
Burgon's scholarly, close-reasoned, fact-filled works such as Inspiration and Interpretation4 still persuade many today that God has indeed preserved every jot and tittle of His Word.
Burgon never married; no doubt this had some bearing on the fact that he, as he put it, was willing to spend an entire 13-hour day to establish the authenticity of a single letter of the New Testament text!#5
Although we cannot agree with all of Burgon's views, or condone his irascibility and smugness, Bible believers rejoice in his love of God's Word and his masterly defense of verbal inspiration.
"If any do complain that I have sometimes hit my opponents rather hard, I take are, it is scarcely possible for one. . determined effectually to preserve the Deposit in its integrity, to hit either too straight or too hard," Burgon wrote in The Revision Reivised.#6
Affer Burgon's death in 1888, his long-time associate, Edward Miller, compiled the dean's notes into two valuable books The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels and The Causes of the Corruption of the Tradlitional Text of the Holy Gospels in 1896.
Of Burgon's thorough New Testament scholarship, Miller wrote,
"The death of Dean Burgon... cut him off in... a task for which he had made preparations during more than thirty years... above all, he devised and superintended a collection of quotations from the New Testament... found in the works of the Fathers and in other ecclesiastical writings, going far beyond ordinary indexes, which may be found in sixteen thick volumes amongst the treasures of the British Museum.#7
In this index, Dean Burgon and his staff amassed over 87,000 quotes or allusions to Scripture by the Church Fathers.#8 Burgon's The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels contains an impressive list of Church Fathers who quoted from the traditional text.#9
Dean Burgon called the text used by most early church writers the "Traditional Text"#10 because of his conviction that it was the true text which by perpetual tradition had been handed down in the church from the days of the apostles onward.
For centuries before the Reformation, the Traditional Text was the text of the entire Greek church. It was then was the text of the Protestant church for centuries after the Reformation. Even today it is the text most Protestants know best, by such names as the Byzantine, Majority, Received, or Textus Receptus.
This text type is available today in English as the Authorized (King James) Version. Its 809,000,000 copies since 1611, in 300 languages,#11 demonstrates the continuum of the Traditional Text.
HIS LABOR
In 1860, Burgon visited the Vatican Library to examine Codex B (Vaticanus), and in 1862 visited St. Catherine's Convent on Mt. Sinai to inspect more ancient manuscripts, including Aleph (Sinaiticus).#12 He toured several European libraries examining and collating various New Testament manuscripts.
Burgon's masterly accumulation of evidence for the Traditional Text was apparent when he confronted his critics with his 300-page masterpiece, The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to St Mark in 1871.#13 His evidence was so complete, and his arguments so unassailable that no one tried to reflite his book--either point by point, or in total.
In his "unanswered and unanswerable" book on this famous passage (Mark 16:9- 20), Burgon wrote,
"The consentient witness of the manuscripts is even extraordinary. With the exception of . . [Vaticailus and Siiiaiticiisj, there is not one Codex in existence which leaves out the last 12 verses of St. Mark. The omission of these 12 verses... destroys our confidence in Codex B and Aleph."#14
"The impurity of the text exhibited by these codices is not a question of opinion, but of fact . . . In the Gospels alone Codex B (Vatican) leaves out words or whole clauses 1,491 times."#15 (Unfortunately, as Burgon showed in 1881, the Revised Version of 1881 and all succeeding modern versions are translated from texts B and Aleph.) Burgon also explained that B and Aleph themselves do not even agree with each other! "It is easier to find two consecutive verses in which the two manuscripts differ. . than two consecutive verses in which they entirely agree," he said.#16
Unlike secular documents, theological heretics purposely and maliciously perverted New Testament documents. The perversions took place within the first hundred years after the New Testament was composed, so those early copies such as B and Aleph were the ones on which the heretics operated, Burgon believed. "It will be found... that in many instances a 14th-century copy of the Gospels may exhibit the truth of Scripture, while the 4th-century copy in all these instances proves to be the depository of a fabricated text," he said.#17
Burgon held that the special providence of God presided over the New Testament text through the ages, divinely guiding the church to reject the false readings of the early centuries, and to gradually accept the true text.
But old corrupt manuscripts such as B and Aleph, discarded by the God-guided usage of the believing church, emerged from their hiding places and were re-instated by modern scholars. (B was found in the Vatican library, and Aleph found in a wastebasket at St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai.)
"Thus it would appear," Burgon remarked ironically,
"that the truth of Scripture has run a very narrow risk of being lost forever to mankind. Dr. Hort contends that it more than half lay 'perdu' on a forgotten shelf in the Vatican Library; Dr. Tischendorf~ that it had been deposited in a wastepaper basket in the convent of St. Catherine at the foot of Mt. Sinai--from which he rescued it on February 4, 1859--neither, we venture to think, a very likely circumstance. We believe that the Author of Scripture hath not by any means, shown Himself so unmindflil of the safety of the Deposit, as these distinguished gentlemen imagine.#18
Burgon was right in utterly rejecting the claims of Tischendorf (1815-74), Tregelles (1813-75), Westcott (1825-1901), Hort (1828-92) and other contemporary scholars who insisted that the "true" New Testament text had at last been discovered after having been lost for 15 centuries.
Is a text trustworthy that arose about A.D. 350 and was not copied and re-copied for the next 1500 years until it was found in a wastebasket of a Mt. Sinai monastery?
Burgon stated,
"I am utterly unable to believe. . .that God's promise has so entirely failed, that at the end of 1800 years, much of the text of the Gospel had.. to be picked. out of a wastepaper basket in the Convent of St. Catherine.#19
Burgon regarded the good state of preservation of B and Aleph in spite of their exceptional age as a proof not of their goodness, but of their badness. Had 'they been good manuscripts, they would have been read to pieces long ago.#20 B, Aleph, and other non-Byzantine manuscripts have survived to the present because they were rejected by the Greek church as faulty and so not used. Thus the fact that B and Aleph are so old is a point against them, not something in their favor.#21
Burgon's associate, Miller, agreed:
"There is much force in the reply of Dean Burgon, that being generally recognized as bad manuscripts, they were left. . on the shelf . . whilst others which were more correct were being thumbed to pieces in constant use.#22
HIS LEADERSHIP
When Hort's English Revised Version appeared in 1881, Burgon was asked to review it for the Quarterly Review. Burgon examined the Revised Version on the supposition that it was what its name implied, and what its authors had been charged to produce, namely, a "revision of the Authorized [King James] Version." But Burgon "speedily found that an entirely different problem awaited. . ." He found that"... the underlying Greek text had been completely refashioned throughout"!#23 No announcement of this important fact had been made by the Revision Committee.#24
"{Ordinary readers... will of course assume that the changes [in the versions) result from the revisor 5 skill in translating--advances. . made in the study of Greek We regret to discover that. . .their work is disfigured throughout by changes which convict a majority of their body. . of an imperfect acquaintance of Greek," said Burgon.#25
Burgon's review articles were printed in his book The Revision Revised.
"My one object has been to defeat the mischievous attempt. . made in' 1881 to thrust upon this church. . a Revision of the Sacred Text, which... I am thoroughly convinced, and able to prove, is untrustworthy from beginning to end. The English (as well as the Greek) of the newly Revised Version is hopelessly at fault. It is ... simply unintelligible how a company of scholars can have spent ten years in elaborating such a very unsatisfactory production. Their uncouth phraseology and their jerky sentences, their pedantic obscurity and their unidiomatic English, contrast painftilly with the 'happy turns of expression, the music of the cadences, the fellicities of the rhythm' of our Authorized Version." #26
HIS LEGACY
Unwilling to dig to the depths Burgon dug, and unable to disprove his facts, Burgon's opponents (particularly Westcott and Hort), reftised to accept his challenges, instead portraying him as some kind of Don Quixote jousting at obstacles too hard for him to understand. And, as if he were a madman, they ignored him.
Still, the issue remains. If the New Testament is just natural book, then the trustworthiness of its text is only a probability, never a certainty. But since it is a supeniatliral book, its text is infallible and indestructible. The original Scriptures were verbally inspired by God and were providentially preserved through the ages.
That being the case, which version is closest to the original writings? The King James Version is nearest the original autographs than any other version in the English language.#27
Today, thousands of Bible-believing Christians are falling into the devil's trap through their use of modern-speech versions based on texts B and Aleph.28 By means of these modern versions, Satan deprives his victims of both the the Sword of the Spirit and the Shield of Faith, leaving them unarmed and helpless in a hostile world.
Although he died 110 years ago, Bible-believers are indebted to Dean John William Burgon for his profound scholarship and his emphasis on the providential preservation of Scripture. Burgon's defense of the New Testament text continues to stand in stark contrast to the misinformation and disinformation being circulated by modern scholarship today.
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