WESTCOTT AND HORT

All this activity of refining reached its peak in the labors of two British Bible scholars, B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort. Like Tischendorf and Tregelles, these men were firm believers in the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. This fact no doubt helped to account for both their zeal as well as their sound judgment.

Westcott and Hort worked on their Greek text for twenty-eight years, from 1853 to 1881. While working independently of each other, they continually compared notes. “They gathered up in themselves,” as A. Souter puts it, “all that was most valuable in the work of their predecessors.” They took every conceivable factor and every pertinent probability into consideration.

Their work has been termed “the most important contribution to the scientific criticism of the New Testament yet made.” Rotherham used it for his later editions, speaking of Westcott and Hort as “consummate masters of textual criticism.” Goodspeed states in the preface of An American Translation (1923):

“I have closely followed the Greek Text of Westcott and Hort, now generally accepted. Every scholar knows its superiority to the late and faulty texts from which the early English translations from Tyndale to the Authorized Version were made.” The text of Westcott and Hort also served as the foundation of the Greek Scripture portion of the American Standard Version (1901) and the Revised Standard Version (1946).

The Westcott and Hort Greek text is now available to all Bible lovers in The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures. One of the latest products of the New World Bible Translation Committee, it was released in 1969 at the “Peace on Earth” International Assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This scholarly work has on each page a wide column and a narrow one. In the wide column to the left there appears the Westcott and Hort text and under each Greek word the English equivalent, a word-for-word translation. In the narrow right-hand column appears an improved text of the 1961 New World Translation. This Kingdom Interlinear Translation also contains much valuable information in its introduction and appendix, and regarding the Greek language itself on the front and back endsheets.