Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener

Setting: Nineteenth-century Anglican scholarship.

F. H. A. Scrivener was an Anglican clergyman and one of the nineteenth century’s most exact New Testament collators. He edited Greek texts, described manuscripts, served on the English New Testament Revision Company, and produced the Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament. His 1881 Greek text reconstructed the readings underlying the Authorized Version where possible and remains the usual printed reference called the Scrivener TR.

The Research Center must distinguish his 1881 reconstruction from an edition used by the 1611 translators and must represent both his conservative objections and his participation in critical revision.

Bibliological positions

Manuscript collation, edition history, and exact comparison are indispensable. He gave significant weight to traditional readings but did not treat the printed TR as beyond revision.

Qualifications and disputes

The 1881 text is a retrospective reconstruction of the Authorized Version’s Greek readings, not the single Greek volume lying before the translators. Scrivener was not simply a Burgonian.

His relation to the Received Text, Revised Version, and Westcott-Hort theory is often simplified by both sides.

Sources

• Public-domain DNB entry — Biographical orientation
• Internet Archive creator search — Digital works catalogue

Principal works

• A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament (1861; later editions); legacy WRK-0037; WRK; Ready after permanent-ID allocation and duplicate scan
• The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (1881); legacy WRK-0038; EDT; Ready to link after authority review