Page:The New Testament in the original Greek - 1881.djvu/83

 INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN' EDITION'. IXXT

(7.) JOHN MILL'S Novum Tettamentum Grtecvm, Oxon. 1707, fo).; often reprinted, especially in Euglaml. The fruit of thirty years' labour. A vastly increased critical apparatus.* The text is from Stephens, 1550. It had been preceded by the New Testament of Bishop JOHN FELL, Oxford, 1075; an edition "more valuable for the impulse it gave to subsequent investigators than for the richness of its own stores of fresh materials " (Scrivener, p. 395).

BENTLEV'S proposed edition, 1720. Dr. Richard Bent- ley (1602-1742), whose rare classical scholarship and criti- cal discernment pre-eminently fitted him for the task, made extensive and expensive preparations for a new edition of the Greek and Latin Testament. He, unfortunately, failed to execute his design ; but he discovered the true principle which, a century afterwards, was executed by the critical genius of Lachmann. He proposed to go back from the Textus Receptus to the oldest text of the first five centuries, hoping that " by taking 2000 errors out of the Pope's Vul- gate and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephcns's," he could "set out an edition of each in columns, without using any book nnder 900 years old, that shall so exactly agree word for word, and order for order, that no two tal- lies, nor two indentures, can agree better. " He issued his Proposals for such an edition in 1720, with the last chap- contrary to the judgment of the Reformers and the chief Protes- tant divines and linguists from Luther and Calvin down to Qro- tins and Cappcllus. " The truth needs not the patronage of an untruth."

print of Mill, with additions, Amsterdam and Leipsic, also Rot- terdam, 1710, deserves to be mentioned.
 * See the list of Mill's MSS. in Scrivener, p. 898. Raster's re-

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