JB Lightfoot

Joseph Barber Lightfoot was born in Liverpool on April 13, 1828. He went to school at King Edward's, Birmingham, under a headmaster who also taught Brooke Foss Westcott, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was senior classic in 1851. He, Westcott, and F. J. A. Hort became the three men who remade English biblical scholarship in that century.

He stayed at Cambridge for nearly thirty years, tutor, Hulsean Professor of Divinity from 1861, Lady Margaret's Professor from 1875. He served on the committee that produced the Revised Version of the New Testament.

His method was simple and heavy. Get the text right, then read it in its own world. His commentaries on Galatians (1865), Philippians (1868), and Colossians and Philemon (1875) are still in print and still used, because they do the work, the manuscripts, the Greek usage, the inscriptions, the history of the city, before saying what the passage means. The long essays attached to them, on the Christian ministry, on the Essenes, on Paul and the Three, are small books in themselves.

The fight that made his name was about the second century. A school of German critics centered on F. C. Baur at Tübingen argued that the early church had been split between a Jewish party under Peter and a Gentile party under Paul, that most of the New Testament was written late to paper over the split, and that the letters of Ignatius and Clement were forgeries produced in the same process. If they were right, the chain from the apostles to the church was broken.

Lightfoot answered with evidence. In a series of articles against an anonymous book called Supernatural Religion, and then in his monumental edition of The Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, and Ignatius and Polycarp in three volumes in 1885, he went through every manuscript, every Syriac and Armenian version, and every quotation in later writers, and established which recension of the Ignatian letters was the original. The seven short letters were genuine. The chain held.

It is a rare thing for a scholarly argument to be settled, and this one largely was. Later critics have pushed at the dating around the edges; almost nobody now defends Baur's reconstruction.

In 1879 he was made Bishop of Durham and left the lecture hall for a coalfield diocese. He gave himself to it, new churches, new clergy, and above all the young men he gathered into his own house at Auckland Castle and trained for ordination. They called themselves Lightfoot's men, and after his death they set up a memorial with their names on it. He also worked among the mining communities through years of hard strikes.

His health broke under the load. He died at Bournemouth on December 21, 1889, at sixty-one, with his edition of Clement unfinished; friends completed it from his papers.

Sources: J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers and his commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, and Colossians; Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion; G. R. Eden and F. C. Macdonald, eds., Lightfoot of Durham; the Dictionary of National Biography (1893)"Lightfoot, Joseph Barber."