of the Apostles were the true and only instruments that God would use in Church matters. This world view caused him great annoyance over the fact that, although about two thirds of the New Testament Revision Committee were also Anglican1 (Church of England; most of whom were liberal), the southern convocation had allowed a few Baptist, Methodist, and other "separatists" (not to mention Vance Smith, a Unitarian who had in writing denied the deity of Jesus2) to participate.3 It was, in fact, this High-Church Anglicanism which led Burgon to place so much emphasis on the N.T. quotations of the Church Fathers, most of whom had been bishops.4 For him, these quotations were vital because they proved that the Traditional Text found in the vast majority of the Greek manuscripts had been authorized from the very beginning by bishops of the early Church.

However, this high Anglican position betrayed Burgon when he came to deal with the printed Greek N.T. text for from the Reformation times down to his own day the Greek text favored by the bishops of the Church of England had been the Textus Receptus – and the TR had not been prepared by bishops but by Erasmus who had not been a bishop but was an independent scholar. Thus Erasmus, and his Greek edition, did not align with Burgon's High-Church stance on apostolic succession and authority.5 Still worse for Burgon was the fact that the particular form of the Textus Receptus used in the Church of England was the third edition of Stephanus – and Stephanus was a Calvinist.6

Hills came to many of the same conclusions that Burgon had reached, but being a conservative Presbyterian and trained in the classics at Yale with a doctorate in N.T. textual criticism from Harvard, his frame of reference was that of a true heir of the Reformation.7 Thus, rather than to the High-Church argument of apostolic succession as a guarantee of the text's fidelity, Hills appealed to the affirmation of the Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith. This Confession

1 The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, Henry Snyder Gehman, ed., (Phil., PA: The Westminster Press, 1970), p. 981. Indeed, the Church of England and its Universities at Oxford and Cambridge were rife with men who had long denied the infallibility of Scripture. These were eager to acclaim a textual theory in harmony with their views. The liberalness of the Revision Committee can hardly be appreciated today. For example, the chairman, Bishop Ellicott, believed there were clear tokens of corruptions in the Authorized Version (Charles John Ellicott, Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture, (New York: E.S. Gorham, 1901), p. 70), and Dean Stanley openly confessed that the Pentateuch was not the work of Moses and that the Biblical narratives contained therein were not infrequently "colored" due to the imperfections of the men who wrote them (Arthur P. Stanley, Essays Chiefly on Questions of Church and State from 1850 to 1870, (London: John Murray, 1884), pp. 329-330). He further believed that the Word of God resided in the sacred books of other religions, as well in the Bible (Essays, p. 24). Bishop Thirlwall retired from the committee and refused to return until the Unitarian, Dr. Vance Smith, was allowed a seat at communion (see following fn. "Samuel Hemphill, A History).

2 Samuel Hemphill, A History of the Revised Version of the N.T., (London: E. Stock, 1906), pp. 36-37. When on 22 June of 1870 the "1881" revisers came together to initiate their work, a communion service (suggested by Westcott) was held in Westminster Abbey. Arthur Westcott, son of B.F. Westcott, recorded that his father and Hort insisted upon the inclusion of the Unitarian scholar, Dr. Vance Smith. The upper house of the Convocation of Canterbury had passed a resolution that no person denying the deity of Christ should take part in the work, yet Smith had so done in his book Bible and Theology. Westcott's son states: "The Revision was almost wrecked at the very outset", and quotes his father in a note to Hort as threatening to sever his connection with the project (as did others!) if Smith were not allowed to participate: "If the Company accept the dictation of Convocation, my work must end." (A. Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, op. cit., Vol. 1, p. 394). Arthur mentions more than once that his father was often considered "unorthodox", "unsound", or "unsafe" (i.e., A. Westcott, Life and Letters of Brooke Foss Westcott, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 218). After receiving Holy Communion with his fellow-revisors, Smith later commented that he did not join in reciting the Nicene Creed or in any way compromise his principles as a Unitarian (Burgon, The Revision Revised, op. cit., p. 507). The English people were infuriated by Smith's inclusion (Ibid.). It may be argued that it is unfair, irrelevant or even an ad hominem to address the liberal theological views of W&H with regard to their textual theory, but a man's world view and the frames of reference that view engenders inevitably bear upon his attitude toward the Sacred Writ.

3 Burgon, The Revision Revised, op. cit., pp. 504-505.

4 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., p. 192.

5 Letis, The Majority Text, op. cit., p. 5.

6 Hills, The King James Version Defended, op. cit., p. 192.

7 Theodore P. Letis, "The Revival of the Ecclesiastical Text and the Claims of the Anabaptist", Calvinism Today, Vol. II, no. 3, (North Yorkshire, England: July 1992), p. 11.

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