The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels: Being the Sequel to the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels

John William Burgon was the fiercest defender of the traditional Greek text of the New Testament in the Victorian era, and this posthumously published work is his masterwork of textual defense. Here Burgon systematically investigates how and why the Gospel texts became corrupted over centuries of manuscript transmission. He argues that errors permeated the earliest copies through both accidental scribal mistakes and intentional alterations motivated by doctrinal disputes. This is not dry scholarship: Burgon writes as a passionate advocate, convinced that the traditional Byzantine text represents the authentic witness of the Gospels and that critical scholars had wrongly relegated it to obscurity. The work engages with criticisms of his earlier volume, addresses specific corruptions in detail, and marshals an extraordinary range of manuscript evidence in service of his thesis. For anyone interested in the history of biblical scholarship, the debates that shaped modern New Testament criticism, or the complex process by which ancient texts survive and transform, Burgon remains an essential voice. His arguments about conflation and 'Western' readings continue to provoke discussion among textual scholars to this day.