3 Review(s)

Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813-1875) was a Cornish-born Biblical scholar who travelled to major libraries all over Europe to study ancient manuscripts with the aim of publishing a more reliable Greek New Testament than had been available to Luther, Tyndale and their successors. The 1844 edition of the Book of Revelation reissued here was his first major publication, and announced his larger project. It contains the Greek text, an English translation, and a meticulous critical apparatus which provides a window into nineteenth-century textual criticism, a burgeoning field in which scholars including Lachmann and Tischendorf were also active. Tregelles gives a detailed history of the printed editions of Revelation and shows how he went beyond the received text, examining more than forty thousand variants to establish the most authoritative version. Tregelles' criteria for evaluating the reliability of manuscripts, described in his Introduction, remain of interest to Biblical scholars today.