44. Who were Westcott and Hort?
QUESTION #44:
Who were Westcott and Hort?
ANSWER:
Two unsaved Bible critics.
EXPLANATION:
Brook Foss Westcott (1825-1903) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892) were two non-Christian Anglican ministers. Fully steeped in the Alexandrian philosophy that “there is no perfect Bible”, they had a vicious distaste for the King James Bible and its Antiochian Greek text, the Textus Receptus. [The infidelity of Westcott and Hort is well documented in this author’s work entitled An Understandable History of the Bible, 1987, Bible Believer’s Press, P.O. Box 1249, Pottstown, PA. 19464]
It cannot be said that they believed that one could attain Heaven by either works or faith, since both believed that Heaven existed only in the mind of man.
Westcott believed in and attempted to practice a form of Communism whose ultimate goal was communal living on college campus’s which he called a “coenobium. ”
Both believed it possible to communicate with the dead and made many attempts to do just that through a society which they organized and entitled “The Ghostly Guild.”
Westcott accepted and promoted prayers for the dead. Both were admirers of Mary (Westcott going so far as to call his wife Sarah, “Mary”),and Hort was an admirer and proponent of Darwin and his theory of evolution.
It is obvious to even a casual observer why they were well equipped to guide the Revision Committee of 1871-1881 away from God’s Antiochian text and into the spell of Alexandria.
They had compiled their own Greek text from Alexandrian manuscripts, which, though unpublished and inferior to the Textus Receptus, they secreted little by little to the Revision Committee. The result being a totally new Alexandrian English Bible instead of a “revision” of the Authorized Version as it was claimed to be.
It has only been in recent years that scholars have examined their unbalanced theories concerning manuscript history and admitted that their agreements were weak to non-existent.
Sadly, both men died having never known the joy and peace of claiming Jesus Christ as their Saviour.