Burgon's Revision Revised OUGHT to set the terms of the debate

It continues to puzzle me how it could ever have happened that the Westcott and Hort production of 1881 came to have such influence in the churches -- of course it was first accepted in the seminaries and then later by the churches, but I have the same question about that --how? What sort of blindness led so many to accept it?

Most discussions of Bible transmission and reliability assume the validity of their work; the anti-KJV-only literature also assumes the validity of their work. Westcott and Hort's Greek text is not used in its totality any more but is accepted at least to the extent of forming part of the Critical Texts in use today, such as Nestle-Aland. Even their textual theory with its purely invented claim of "conflation" in the Textus Receptus is taken seriously, and much of their English translation even continues to be carried over in subsequent translations.

After reading Burgon this all strikes me as such a dreadful mistake I mourn for the churches. I can't help thinking that if Burgon's work had been made generally known from the beginning this could not have happened. Hardly anyone reads Burgon now -- he's become pretty much the property of KJV-onlyism and few others read him. He gets footnotes in just about every discussion of Bible translation and transmission but an actual quote from his Revision Revised is a very rare find, let alone a discussion of anything he said.

Was it also the case at the beginning that Burgon was simply ignored? What happened back then? How did all that prodigious work of Burgon's get so utterly and completely buried and forgotten? Was it that the propaganda about the 1881 Revision managed to get itself falsely disseminated as the legitimate updating of the KJV it was supposed to be but never was, simply bypassing such criticism as Burgon's?

I can't help thinking that so many great men of the church who have accepted the Westcott and Hort position can't have read Burgon, such as B B Warfield, J Gresham Machen, John Warwick Montgomery, James I Packer, R C Sproul, John MacArthur and John Piper. How was it first presented to them? As above I suppose, as the legitimate updating it was supposed to be but wasn't, bypassing the criticism as if it didn't even exist. Only the one voice was heard in other words. I can only guess that must have been the case.

So is it that the horrific errors and stupidities of Westcott and Hort are unknown because nobody reads Burgon? Or, depressing thought, is it that they have read him and decided against him in favor of Westcott and Hort? In that case I would have to have a very bad opinion of their judgment, which I'd rather not have. But in either case I'd like to know what really happened, how it came about as it did.

The Bible Versions debate that has raged for a few decades now is miscast, it seems to me, it gets fought around the fringes of what's really important. Somehow from the anti-KJV-only side the debate has been cast in Westcott and Hort's own terms. They have been made the standard, simply assumed, not open to question. Burgon's work should set the standard. He should be the one who has to be answered, he should be the one whose thinking defines the terms of the debate.

As I understand it, KJV-onlyism rose up in reaction against the early uncritical acceptance of the translations that followed on the Westcott and Hort production, and skewed the focus of the debate in the wrong direction from that time on. It became a doctrinal war when it really ought to be recognized as primarily a problem of scholarship. Of course there are doctrinal issues involved but Burgon's arguments are focused on the bad scholarship of the revising committee of 1881, on their superstitious and irrational judgment of the Greek texts, their reliance on pure speculation and assumption instead of evidence, their inadequate understanding of both Greek and English, and on and on.

To read Burgon is to become acquainted with a man of careful scholarship who DOES rely on evidence and put in prodigious work mustering his evidence, but also a man of solid biblical spirituality whose judgments come across as trustworthy in a way his opponents' simply do not. He SHOWS the Westcott and Hort textual decisions, English decisions and insane Theory to be unworthy of anyone's consideration. He PROVES it.

Yet that very Westcott and Hort Trojan Horse of incompetence, bad judgment, literary philistinism and spiritual obtuseness is what is now dominating our English Bibles, while the debate rages on about a hundred irrelevancies or at least secondary issues instead.

How I wish I had the ability to do this subject justice.