The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Abbot, Ezra

ABBOT, Ezra, American Biblical scholar: b. Jackson, Me., 28 April 1819; d. 21 March 1884. He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated at Bowdoin 1840, and after teaching in Maine and Cambridge, Mass., became in 1856 assistant librarian of Harvard. In 1872 he received a D. D. from Harvard, though a layman, and thence till death was professor of New Testament criticism and interpretation in the Cambridge Divinity School. His wise reading and wonderful verbal memory made him one of the foremost of textual critics and bibliographers; his master of the Greek New Testament text places him beside the leading scholars of the world; and on the American New Testament Revision Committee, 1871–81, he was a chief agent in putting its work on an even level of authority with the English, in minute accuracy of scholarship as well as broad, acute judgment. Indifferent to fame, he gave his best work to collaborations or private assistance mostly unacknowledged and unrealized except by scholars. His most important individual book was on the ‘Authorship of the Fourth Gospel’ (1880), in which he announced the important discovery of Tatian's ‘Diatessaron.’ Of his other critical work, besides the great Revision, his half of the prolegomena to Tischendorf's Greek New Testament (1884–94), his additions to Mitchell's ‘Critical Handbook of the New Testament’ (1880), and his revision of Schaff's ‘Companion to the New Testament’ (1883), should be mentioned. As a bibliographer, his greatest fame was for the curious and exhaustive catalogue of relevant books he furnished for Alger's ‘Critical History of a Future Life’ (1864), and his notes to Smith's ‘Bible Dictionary’ (Am. ed. 1867–70). He also wrote many papers for periodicals. His monographs were collected by J. H. Thayer and published under the title ‘Critical Essays’ (Boston 1888). Consult Barrow ‘Ezra Abbot’ (Boston 1884).