Publisher: Oxford, 1707
Author: John Mill
John Mill, Novum Testamentum Graecum, cum lectionibus variantibus MSS. exemplarium, versionun, editionum SS. patrum et scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, et in easdem nolis. Oxford, 1707.
Mill spent thirty years on this tome, seeing it through to publication just two weeks before his death. Using the third edition (1550) of Stephanus’s Greek New Testament (in the tradition of Erasmus, which text, through many editions and minor changes, would become known as the Textus Receptus) as his base text, he produced an apparatus that gave the readings of 100 Greek manuscripts as well as those of several church fathers and versions. This apparatus revealed 30,000 variants among the witnesses, causing Roman Catholic scholars to decry the Textus Receptus as a ‘paper pope’ which was contradicted by the MSS of the New Testament. Some Protestants, too, attacked Mill’s work because they saw it as a threat to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. It was Mill’s apparatus that Swabian scholar, Johann Albrecht Bengel, examined patiently with an eye toward theology. He concluded that no Protestant doctrine was jeopardized by any of the variants. The rare and pristine copy of Mill’s work that CSNTM photographed is housed at Clare College, Cambridge.
