Alexander Nicoll and the Study of German Biblical Criticism in Early Nineteenth-Century Oxford
History has not been kind to Alexander Nicoll, a brilliant oriental scholar who is now a forgotten figure, partly because he died before he could achieve the fame he deserved, and partly because his work in the 1820s was soon to be overshadowed by the turmoil of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1979
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| In: |
The journal of ecclesiastical history
Year: 1979, Volume: 30, Issue: 4, Pages: 451-459 |
| Online Access: |
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| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | History has not been kind to Alexander Nicoll, a brilliant oriental scholar who is now a forgotten figure, partly because he died before he could achieve the fame he deserved, and partly because his work in the 1820s was soon to be overshadowed by the turmoil of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Even Dr E. B. Pusey, a pupil of Nicoll's, and his successor as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, seems to have forgotten the quiet but scholarly way in which Nicholl had worked to combat the liberalism of the German biblical critics. Furthermore, much of what Nicoll said about written Aramaic sources underlying the Synoptic Gospels would be considered by many present day New Testament scholars to have been mistaken; most modern biblical scholars favour the view that Mark's Gospel was written first and used as a source by Matthew and Luke, although there is still considerable disagreement about the explanation of those passages which occur in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark. Even though he may have been mistaken, however, Nicoll was an important figure in the Oxford of the 1820s in so far as he was grappling with the problems posed by the biblical critics at a time when hardly anyone in Oxford—even the Oriel Noetics like Whately and Davison—was doing so, and it is perhaps time to question the commonly held assumption that the Oriel Noetics, together with Newman, Keble and Pusey, held the monopoly of the best theological scholarship in the Oxford of the early nineteenth century. |
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| ISSN: | 1469-7637 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: The journal of ecclesiastical history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0022046900029195 |