A Revision Becomes a Reconstruction

Part I: The Revision That Changed Its Object · Article 1 of 6

The English New Testament published in 1881 announced itself as a revision. That word carried a definite promise. The work would retain the Authorized Version as its object, correct it where necessary, and disturb its language as little as faithfulness allowed. The Revisers repeatedly affirmed that promise. Convocation had not contemplated a new translation, and the first working rule required “as few alterations as possible.”¹

Yet the Revision Company performed two different operations. It revised the Authorized Version’s English, and it also decided which Greek readings ought to stand behind that English. The first operation asked whether the translation accurately represented its exemplar. The second asked whether the exemplar itself should be replaced at a disputed place.

Those questions are related, but they are not the same.

If an English rendering fails to express the Greek from which the Authorized Version was made, correcting the English is translation revision. If an English rendering faithfully expresses that Greek, but the English is changed because a committee prefers another Greek reading, the committee is no longer correcting the translation as a translation. It is reconstructing the textual basis to which the translation must conform.

This distinction is the threshold of the entire controversy. It does not require a story about an unnoticed book swap, a forbidden procedure, or a vote that never occurred. The Company’s own Preface states what happened. Greek readings were discussed, voted upon, and adopted according to stated rules. The historical question is not whether the Revisers were permitted to do this under their rules. They were. The question is what kind of authority they exercised when they did it.

The Promise Contained in “Revision”

The revision began with resolutions adopted by the Convocation of Canterbury in May 1870. The first declared it desirable to revise the Authorized Version. The second allowed marginal renderings and necessary emendations in its text. The third said, “we do not contemplate any new translation.” The fourth required the style of the existing Version to be closely followed.²

The working rules reinforced that conservative design. Alterations were to be few. Their expression was, as far as possible, to use the language of the Authorized Version and earlier English versions. Each Company would examine its portion twice. On final review, a change required the approval of two thirds of those present.³

This was not empty language. Much of the New Testament Company’s work was revision in the ordinary sense. It reconsidered grammar, clarified obscure expressions, regularized names, adjusted punctuation, and replaced English wording when the existing rendering was judged inaccurate. One may dispute particular decisions without confusing the nature of the task. All such changes answer the same governing question: How should this Greek be expressed in English?

But Rule 4 introduced another question. It directed the Companies to adopt the text for which the evidence was “decidedly preponderating,” even when that text differed from the one underlying the Authorized Version.⁴ The Revisers were therefore not merely allowed to improve the Authorized Version as an English representation of its received Greek basis. They were instructed to adjudicate among rival Greek readings.

The conservative language of revision and the reconstructive power of Rule 4 stood together from the beginning. That is why the decisive change need not be proved by speculating about private intentions. It is visible in the constitution of the work.

Two Operations, Two Standards

Suppose a printer has before him a Greek exemplar containing reading A, and an English translation that imperfectly renders A. He corrects the English so that it represents A more precisely. The Greek exemplar judges the translation. His work is ministerial: the servant is corrected by the standard.

Now suppose the English accurately renders A, but the editor concludes that reading B is earlier. He changes the English because he has first changed the Greek that ought to govern it. That may occur at a single word or clause. It may be defended by manuscripts, versions, patristic citations, transcriptional probabilities, or a theory of textual history. Nevertheless, the logical order is different. The editor is no longer asking only whether the translation conforms to its textual standard. He is deciding which textual form will function as the standard.

The 1881 Preface makes this order unusually plain. Before discussing translation, the Revisers discuss “Text.” They call revision of the Greek text the necessary foundation of their work. They also say that their first class of English alterations consisted of changes required by a change in the Greek reading.⁵

That sentence is a key to the Revision. Some English changes did not result from a newly discovered defect in the Authorized Version’s rendering of its own Greek. They followed from a prior critical judgment that another Greek reading should take the governing place. In those cases the English revision was the visible consequence of an antecedent textual reconstruction.

“Reconstruction” here is an analytical description, not an accusation that the Company falsely claimed to print a complete critical edition. The Preface expressly says that constructing “a continuous and complete Greek text” did not fall within the Company’s province. It normally left a variant unexamined when either Greek reading would yield the same English. Its textual decisions were limited by the needs of the translation.⁶

That limitation matters. It prevents us from treating the Revisers’ Greek decisions as though they formed an exhaustive, independent edition produced in the same manner as a modern critical text. But it does not erase what they did decide. Wherever competing Greek readings affected the English, the Company judged their rival claims, adopted one, and made that judgment govern the translation. The absence of a committee-produced continuous Greek text limits the extent of the reconstruction; it does not change its kind.

The Company’s Own Account

The procedure was neither casual nor formally concealed. According to the Preface, different schools of textual criticism were represented. In the earlier stages, every variant requiring consideration was discussed and voted upon. Later, established precedents allowed a shorter process, though any member could call for full discussion. A simple majority decided the first revision. On the second, a two-thirds majority was necessary to retain or introduce a reading contrary to the one presumed to underlie the Authorized Version.⁷

Nor were readers left wholly without notice. Rule 4 had envisioned marginal indications when the adopted Greek differed from the Authorized Version’s basis. The Company found that arrangement inconvenient. Instead, the University Presses undertook to publish the Revisers’ departures in connection with complete Greek New Testaments. F. H. A. Scrivener’s companion edition printed the Greek text represented by the Authorized Version and recorded the Revisers’ variations; Edwin Palmer’s edition presented the readings adopted by the Revisers as a continuous text.⁸

The New Testament Company therefore did not simply produce fresh English sentences. Its work generated a public record of Greek-text decisions substantial and coherent enough to be represented in companion Greek editions.

Westcott and Hort belong to this history, but precision is essential. Their private Greek text was not unknowingly substituted for the Authorized Version’s basis. They began constructing their own text in 1853 and placed successive portions in the hands of the Revisers from 1871 through 1876. They later described their project as another attempt to determine the original words of the New Testament writers.⁹ Their text supplied the Company with a developed critical alternative, but the Revisers discussed and voted on readings. The Greek text represented by the Revision is therefore not simply identical to the Westcott–Hort edition.

Later articles will examine how Westcott and Hort’s unpublished work entered the committee, how their method influenced its deliberations, and why their theory mattered beyond individual votes. At this stage, one conclusion is enough: the Revision Company knowingly exercised textual judgment, and its English changes sometimes embodied that judgment.

The Strongest Defense of the Revision

A fair account must state the strongest defense.

The Company could not revise responsibly, the defense says, while pretending that no Greek variants existed. The Authorized Version’s translators had themselves compared editions and placed alternate readings in the margin. By 1870, scholars possessed evidence and collations unavailable in 1611. Convocation expressly empowered the Revisers to adopt the reading supported by preponderating evidence. The decisions were made by a learned and ecclesiastically constituted body, not imposed by one editor. Multiple critical schools participated, deliberation occurred, and a supermajority protected the final text from novelty. The Company also distinguished its limited task from construction of a complete Greek edition.

These facts defeat several careless charges. The rules did permit changes to the Greek basis. The Company did vote. Westcott and Hort’s text was known to the members who received it. The final decisions were corporate, and the resulting textual basis was not Westcott and Hort’s edition at every point.

But this defense establishes orderly procedure, not rightful textual authority. A vote may be properly conducted and still answer a question the church has no commission to place above an already authenticated text. Diversity among critics may check individual caprice, yet it cannot transform critical judgment into divine testimony. A two-thirds majority can tell us what a committee resolved. It cannot, by itself, tell us that the church’s authentic Greek Scripture had to be reconstituted by that resolution.

The issue is therefore deeper than whether the Revisers followed their rules. They did. The issue is whether the text that rules the translation is itself to be received as God’s preserved Word or repeatedly constituted by expert adjudication.

The Historical Verdict

What kind of work did the New Testament Revision Company actually perform?

It performed a conservative revision of English expression and a selective reconstruction of the underlying Greek text. These operations were combined in one publication, but they must be distinguished in judgment.

Where the Revisers corrected the English by the Greek text underlying the Authorized Version, the original-language exemplar remained the rule and the translation remained subordinate. Where they replaced that Greek reading and then changed the English to match the replacement, critical judgment became the immediate court of appeal for deciding what the exemplar should be.

This does not mean every English alteration was reconstructive. The Preface lists several classes of change, only the first of which was positively required by a different Greek reading. Nor does it mean every adopted Greek reading was necessarily false. A true reading does not become false merely because a critic argues for it badly. The historical claim is about the governing operation: at disputed places affecting translation, the committee treated the text as an object to be critically reconstituted.

The Revision therefore changed its object. It was commissioned under the name of revising a translation, but its own rules made the translation’s textual basis revisable as well. Once that second object entered the work, “faithfulness” no longer meant only faithfulness of English to a settled Greek exemplar. It also meant faithfulness to the committee’s judgment about which Greek reading deserved to become the exemplar.

That is the turn from revision to reconstruction.

The Confessional Question

The Reformed doctrine of Scripture supplies a different order of authority.

William Whitaker argued that the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New are authentic, while translations are approved insofar as they agree with those originals. He later stated the relation in categorical form: translations must be brought back to the originals, received when they agree, and corrected when they do not.¹⁰ The original-language Scripture judges the version. The version does not establish its own rule, and the scholar does not stand over both as the source of their authority.

The Westminster Confession gives this doctrine its classic ecclesiastical expression. Because the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek were immediately inspired and, by God’s singular care and providence, “kept pure in all ages,” they are “authentical.” In controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal to them.¹¹

The Confession does not say that one surviving manuscript is errorless, that printers never introduce mistakes, or that collation is forbidden. Neither does it make a translation coordinate with the original-language text. It identifies an extant, providentially preserved, authentic rule to which the church can appeal.

The doctrinal pressure created by reconstruction is now visible. If the authentic Greek text is present only as an editorial goal behind the manuscripts—an object that must continually be approximated, revised, and replaced—then the final appeal cannot occur without a prior appeal to the critics who constitute the current text. The originals may remain supreme in formal language, but the critical process becomes functionally prior in access: before Scripture can judge, the reconstruction must tell the church which words count as Scripture.

That is a magisterial function even when exercised by modest men. The problem lies not first in tone, learning, or motive, but in order. Evidence that ought to be a witness is made into a tribunal; scholarly judgment that ought to serve the text is made to constitute it.

The Exact Doctrinal Entailment

The argument of this article can be stated without exaggeration.

First, an English translation is ministerial to the authentic Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. It must be tested and, when necessary, corrected by them.

Second, correcting a translation by its Greek exemplar is not the same act as replacing that exemplar through a critical judgment. The former subjects the translation to the text; the latter subjects the received textual reading to reconstruction.

Third, the New Testament Revision Company performed both acts. This is established by its resolutions, rules, Preface, voting procedure, and companion Greek editions.

Fourth, a confessional doctrine of an authentic text kept pure in all ages cannot treat the identity of that text as merely the latest provisional result of autonomous reconstruction. Manuscripts, versions, citations, and editorial comparisons may ministerially attest, clarify, and expose printing error. They may not acquire authority to unsettle what God has authenticated through his Word and providence.

This article has not yet demonstrated every historical step required to identify Westcott and Hort’s particular influence. It has established the prior category without which that influence cannot be judged.

Ministerial Application

Whenever a proposed “revision” is placed before the church, ask two questions.

The first is obvious: Does the English accurately translate the original-language text?

The second is more fundamental: What original-language text is being allowed to judge the English, and by what authority was that text made the judge?

If the first question is asked while the second is hidden, a textual reconstruction can enter under the gentler name of translation improvement. A rendering may be clear, grammatical, and even elegant while embodying a prior decision to remove, replace, or bracket the received reading. The English wording cannot be evaluated adequately until its textual basis is named.

Ministerial scholarship makes that basis explicit. It compares witnesses, records their testimony, corrects demonstrable accidents of printing, and explains the language of Scripture. But it does so beneath the authority of the text, not as a standing court empowered to produce a new object of faith.

The 1881 Revision marks a decisive institutional moment because it joined English revision to critical reconstruction and gave both results the prestige of one ecclesiastical enterprise. Before assessing the personalities, manuscripts, or theories that shaped its Greek decisions, we must first see the change in the work itself.

The translation was no longer the only thing being revised.

What This Article Has and Has Not Proved

Proved: The 1881 New Testament Company was authorized to revise the English of the Authorized Version and to adopt Greek readings different from its underlying text. It discussed and voted on those readings, and some English changes followed directly from them. The work therefore included both translation revision and selective textual reconstruction.

Not proved: That the Greek changes were forbidden by the rules; that the Company never voted; that Westcott and Hort secretly exchanged one complete book for another; that the Revisers’ Greek decisions were identical at every point with the Westcott–Hort text; or that every member acted with the same knowledge, motive, or culpability.

Established for the next article: The central historical and confessional question is not whether textual evidence may be examined, but whether critical judgment may constitute the text that judges the church’s translations.

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1. The New Testament Revision Company, “Preface to the Edition of A.D. 1881,” reproducing the resolutions and rules of the Revision Company, Bible Researcher. ↩
2. Ibid., resolutions of the Convocation of Canterbury, May 3 and 5, 1870. ↩
3. Ibid., rules 1–6, adopted May 25, 1870. ↩
4. Ibid., rule 4. ↩
5. Ibid., sections “Text” and “Translation.” ↩
6. Ibid., section “Text.” ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. F. H. A. Scrivener, ed., The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version, together with the Variations Adopted in the Revised Version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881), archival edition. Edwin Palmer’s companion text was published by the Oxford University Press in 1881. ↩
9. B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), §§20–22, Internet Archive. ↩
10. William Whitaker, A Disputation on Holy Scripture, trans. William Fitzgerald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), First Controversy, Question II, chapters 1 and 7. ↩
11. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 1.8, Orthodox Presbyterian Church. ↩

Notes

Bibliography

Palmer, Edwin, ed. The Greek Testament with the Readings Adopted by the Revisers of the Authorised Version. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881.

Scrivener, F. H. A., ed. The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version, together with the Variations Adopted in the Revised Version. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1881.

The New Testament Revision Company. “The Preface.” In The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Translated out of the Greek: Being the Version Set Forth A.D. 1611 Compared with the Most Ancient Authorities and Revised A.D. 1881. Oxford and Cambridge, 1881.

Westcott, B. F., and F. J. A. Hort. Introduction to the New Testament in the Original Greek. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882.

Whitaker, William. A Disputation on Holy Scripture. Translated by William Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849.

The Westminster Confession of Faith. 1647.