The Later Years

Abstract

In SPT’s later years, numerous responsibilities distracted him from the magnum opus of his Greek NT. His health (particularly his eyesight) was fragile, and the needs of older relatives were demanding. In the Compton Street Chapel, of which SPT was an elder, ministerial uncertainty raised further anxiety. A new pastor Elliott resolved the problem temporarily but after the congregation’s dispersal in 1866 SPT worshipped with the Presbyterians. The legacy of SPT’s earlier Brethren connection was arguably his nemesis especially when Brethren quoted his former writings, but in any case he was increasingly isolated in his doctrinal certainties. His rapprochement with Tischendorf was tenuous but he was encouraged by the rediscovery of the Codex Reuchlini. A short holiday in Brittany was a further diversion from the magnum opus, as was the completion of his edition of the Codex Muratorianus, but for SPT apologetics was but another field of Christian duty.

12.1 Health Challenges

It is hard to say how soon Tregelles can be said to have fully recovered from his first stroke. The postscript to the Preface of Codex Zacynthius , which indicates progress but not yet complete restoration is dated June 1861, but in November of that year he was a guest of Henry Alford at the Deanery in Canterbury. Alford, who was also a textual scholar, was said by his wife to have ‘always found great pleasure’ in SPT’s company, and this occasion was no exception. Clearly, Tregelles was back to his sociable self as Alford’s journal bears witness:

Nov. 7 [1861] At three Dr. Tregelles came, a most wonderful man for information on all subjects. I took him to see the library and the lions. He kept us amused during his visit … [The following evening several guests] dined at the Deanery. Dr. Tregelles most amusing.¹

In 1861, SPT was not yet 50 years old and seems to have been making good progress, but as we have noted before, his health always tended to be fragile. There are several indications that for quite some time his eyes, in particular, had been giving him serious trouble, probably aggravated by ‘the vapour of the Hydro-sulphate of Ammonia’ with the help of which, in October 1853, he had been able successfully to decipher the palimpsest of St Matthew’s Gospel preserved in Trinity College, Dublin.² Such chemical treatments were of course only a last resort, and usually the reading process was simply a long drawn out test of endurance.

The palimpsest (Codex Nitriensis [R]) acquired by the British Museum in 1842 exemplified the problem at its worst. The Syrian monks in the monastery of St Mary Deipara in the Nitrian desert in Egypt had done their best to scrape away the original (sixth century) Greek uncials of part of St Luke’s gospel and had used the recycled vellum on which to record a more recent treatise in Syriac. It was to collate the palimpsest, Tregelles explained to his readers, that he had been ‘in London for many weeks in the summer of 1854 and I investigated almost every legible letter of these Palimpsest fragments’.³ From his account, it is clear that the challenge was daunting:

The ancient writing is so faint that it requires a clear day, with as much light as the British Museum affords,⁴ and also an eye well and long accustomed to read ancient MSS: in parts also a strong lens was almost indispensable; and sometimes it was difficult to trace any of the erased letters, except by holding the leaf to the light and catching the traces of the strokes by which the vellum had been scraped rather thinner by the style … These hindrances were such as to make much patience requisite…⁵

Over the years such demanding work took its toll and at one point, in 1857 SPT notes that ‘at present my eyes are so inflamed that I can hardly use them’. A year later in February 1858, he had probably not yet seen the British Museum’s magnificent newly opened reading room , with its window-topped dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, and when he mentions his desire to re-examine the Nitrian palimpsest his comment is stoically philosophical:

If the days are not clear it will be in vain to try: my eyes especially the right, are often rather dim. Indeed I at times am much discouraged at progressing so slowly, and I fear it must disappoint others: but I cannot hurry, for if I did I should of necessity make mistakes; and to be accurate it takes me five times as long to look at a reference or a passage as it did when my eyes were less worn.⁶

But clearly, the problems with his eyesight were only an aspect of a more general frailty that could afflict him at any time of the year. Late in 1863, he attributes it to winter temperatures:

I doubt much if I can write any thing satisfactory at present: the cold has left me so weak especially in my head that I am very little capable of definite thought or giving expression properly to what I want.⁷

In August two years later, he gives a similar account of the delay in his preparation of the proofs for the third part of his Greek New Testament:

My head has been in such a condition as to make me nearly powerless: however today I am thankful to say it feels much better while in my room at the top of the house than it did yesterday.⁸

Such positive moments were easily qualified by a wider sense of discouragement that often troubled him. In a letter to the Master of Balliol in 1864, his initially upbeat tone soon gives way to something less optimistic:

I am truly thankful for the measure of restored health, which I am permitted to enjoy. I am now able to spend a good part of each day closely occupied in my study; altho’ the quantity produced in result is often very little; for I get on with any thing very slowly, as my vigour of brain is far less than my general health.⁹

Sometimes, indeed, one is tempted to dismiss such references to his health as a variety of hypochondria, were it not for the evident vexation to which such obstacles gave rise. In one particularly moving letter to his long-time patron and supporter, he puts this sense of frustration in a wider context:

It has been, as I believe you know, very far from agreeable to me that the work has occupied so much of my life. I did hope that it might have been completed years ago, leaving me with vigour and ability to earn my maintenance in some other way without being in any way burdensome to others; but the Lord has not seen fit to give me the measure of health needed for proceeding as I wished: and now every proof sheet leaves me with my eyes thoroughly dim …

I can assure you that there neither is nor will be a day of needless delay on my part. [For] Life and ability to accomplish this, the one piece of Christian service for which I seem to have been fitted, has long been my daily prayer.¹⁰

12.2 Family Responsibilities

If SPT’s state of health was a cause for concern in these last years, there were other similar but more foreseeable difficulties. Both he and his wife had elderly relatives whose health was growing problematical. Back in 1812, when Walter Prideaux, SPT’s maternal uncle and future father-in-law had moved to Plymouth, several of his siblings remained in his home town, Kingsbridge, and perhaps it was natural that when the twenty-one-year-old SPT left his Welsh home in Neath in 1834–1835, his widowed mother, Walter’s sister would sooner or later return to her birthplace where there were still some of her relatives. So now, in 1861 she was over 70, living in Kingsbridge, with SPT’s unmarried sister Anna Rebecca who was not always at home.¹¹ From time to time, therefore SPT, who was deeply devoted to his mother, would make the journey, with Sarah Anna, to Kingsbridge (twenty miles SE of Plymouth) to spend some time with mother Tregelles and other members of the Prideaux family. Another motive for such a break was that it separated SPT from his library for a few days and provided his eyes with some relief. It was therefore a particularly poignant moment when, in 1866, he learnt of his mother’s sudden ‘almost total loss of sight. On the 23rd of February, she was able to read with her usual ease, but the next morning she could not see a letter.’¹²

More frequent were Sarah Anna’s visits to her widowed mother, Sarah Elizabeth Prideaux, who lived a mile or two away in Frankfurt Street, Plymouth, with her unmarried daughters, Augusta and Lucy and her widowed son Charles whose wife Eliza had been the sister of Benjamin Newton’s first wife, Hannah. Sarah Anna’s mother was four years older than SPT’s mother and her health was regularly a cause for concern until her death in December 1866.

12.3 Ecclesiastical Anxieties

12.3.1 Uncertainty at Compton Street

Rather different from these domestic anxieties, but in some ways more disturbing were the recurring ecclesiastical worries and responsibilities in Plymouth from which SPT found it very hard to escape. To understand why these were such a burden for him, we need to go back to the congregation of Brethren in Ebrington Street, which had been the first church with which SPT had been associated after his evangelical conversion. Significantly diminished in numbers by the withdrawal of John Darby and his followers, it had relocated in 1848 to a smaller building in Compton Street where it came to be known as an ‘Evangelical Protestant Church.’¹³ In spite of their being cut off from almost all the people who liked to call themselves ‘Brethren’, there can be little doubt that some of the congregation hankered after the earlier unstructured brethren style of ‘open meeting’, but to which SPT was now strongly opposed. As one of the elders of the church in Compton Street, he pressed the congregation to remain true to what had effectively been the Presbyterian ideal advocated by Benjamin Newton when he had been calling the tune in earlier years. They practised open communion, which required no membership but recognized the need for ‘Godly discipline’. Some of their numbers were recognized as teachers but, true to their Brethren roots, they insisted that theirs was not necessarily an exclusive ministry.

Deeply wounded by the behaviour of Darby and his followers, Tregelles and others like him insisted that they were now no longer part of the ‘Brethren.’ SPT might sometimes do some teaching but he made clear that he was not their minister. For a time that role was taken by John Offord ¹⁴ who had joined the Brethren in the early 1840s but his removal to London in 1862 posed a serious problem because SPT and his fellow elders, William Haydon ¹⁵ and Dr. J. P. Riach,¹⁶ now had to turn for help from visiting ministers like Henry Bellenden Bulteel ¹⁷ and Henry Heywood.¹⁸ Tregelles was now clear in his own mind about the priority of his textual work and was adamant that it was no longer his role to be a principal pillar of this congregation. In fact, he was beginning to think that the days of the assembly in Compton Street were numbered:

The more I see, the more satisfied I am that any attempt to keep on Compton St as a meeting would only be a protracted weakness, in which souls would not be really blessed … I am unable to take any responsibility in the matter myself; and if more able, I might plainly say that I have had too many years the weariness of trying to put to rights what others have put very wrong.¹⁹

With the elders and deacons looking for a new full-time minister, the situation became particularly alarming for Tregelles in December 1862 when his fellow elder Captain Haydon supported a candidate named Henry Hake of whose teaching SPT very decidedly disapproved. Haydon was quite outspoken in his support for Hake and when he accused Tregelles of being harshly dogmatic and unreasonable, there were some members of the congregation who supported him. At this point in some desperation, SPT appears to have resorted to subterfuge. In a private approach to Benjamin Newton, he asked him to write to Haydon and Newton did so. Coming from the much-revered former minister, the intervention seems to have done the trick:

I am greatly obliged to you for your prompt kindness in writing to Mr Haydon; you have rendered good and effectual service in this matter, and it has been very successful; Haydon now seems to wonder at what I can only regard as an infatuation. He is now like a man who is just got out of a mist. I do not think that he is likely to go wrong again about this matter.²⁰

For the time, being the church seemed to be at peace and this appeared to be even more the case early the next year when the church found a ministerial candidate who enjoyed SPT’s full approval.

12.3.2 A New Pastor

William Elliott (1829–1904) was an Irish graduate of Trinity College Dublin who had served for a few years as the pastor of an Evangelical Protestant chapel in Epsom, Surrey.²¹ Both Tregelles and Newton, whose judgement, albeit given at a distance, was still treated with great respect by the older members of the church, were decidedly in favour of the candidate’s appointment. Believing that the doctrinal foundations of Elliott’s teaching were sound, the sense of relief is clear in SPT’s letter to Newton and the strength of his convictions is also evident:

[the members of the church] knew very well that unless decided ground was taken that [sic] I would not stay in Compton St, and thus things have assumed their present form. The letter to Mr Elliott cost me a little thought in drawing up: I was almost surprised that Haydon did not object to a single word; his judgement seemed quite to be led right in the matter which is a great cause for thankfulness. It [sc. Tregelles’s letter to Elliott] was read at a meeting (of which notice had been given) and no objection of any kind was made. The terms introduced are those, which I used years ago in registering the chapel in Compton St. so that there was no new designation devised. I trust that Mr Elliott coming here maybe for blessing …²²

At last, it seemed that the church at Compton Street was set for consolidation and steady growth, and Tregelles could rest assured that the leadership was in good hands. Attendance numbers began to increase and the stormy days of ecclesiastical conflict seemed to be over. Again the note of satisfaction in SPT’s letter to Newton is apparent:

I am quite surprized at the kind of influence that I am now allowed to have in Compton St; the confusion introduced by Mr Henry Hake has been I think overruled for much good. Things can be done definitely now, which were opposed a while ago … I have had to deal with strange forms of perversity; this has needed some patience; but I do trust there is fruit to be found at last.²³

At Elliott’s inauguration in Compton Street Chapel on 4 March 1863, it was Tregelles who introduced him and on behalf of the church welcomed him, explaining with typical care and precision the circumstances that had preceded the appointment.²⁴ Elliott in turn replied agreeing with all the positions that Tregelles had outlined.

12.3.3 Dissolution

For some three years, the church seems to have prospered but in 1866 it was evident that the new pastor wanted a greater degree of control and found himself in public dispute with the deacons over financial matters. Elliott appears to have been somewhat confrontational in public—a form of behaviour that was unlikely to endear him to SPT who was the epitome of discretion and diplomacy. Many perceived Elliott’s conduct as outrageously boastful and we have no reason to doubt the reliability of SPT’s account, bearing in mind his continued approval of the content of Elliott’s teaching:

To me it is a very sorrowful thing that a person of Mr Elliott’s ability and who has so generally correct an apprehension of Scripture truth, should mar everything by his entire want of self control and his extraordinary doings. There are many things, which I should have said to him, had it not been that his habit of making public use of private communications (misapprehending them or misrepresenting them) has effectually prevented me.

When Elliott publicly criticized the deacons, identifying some of them individually by name, hardly surprisingly they submitted their resignation as a group, which was probably what Elliott had hoped for, but on the wider front reactions were not concerted and seem to have been unplanned as SPT’s sadly pathetic comment indicates:

As far as I know there has hardly been any conference even, among those who have separated themselves from Mr Elliott: it has rather been, as Dr Hingston said to me as to his own course & that of his family, that various persons (without planning any course for the future) alike felt that they must ‘cease to do evil’ … We and most of our friends are now scattered and all the future I leave in the Lord’s hands …²⁵

A week later, he was considering the alternative places of worship in which his fellow members might find solace:

Mr [Frederick] Courtney ²⁶ at Charles Chapel is attractive to some; others feel more confidence in Mr Greaves ²⁷ at Charles Church; Mr [Joseph] Wood at the Presbyterian Chapel, Eldad, would get most of my consideration, if he were not so excitable in his manner in the pulpit. He is most gentle in private, but his voice and manners in preaching make me nervous almost.²⁸ Some I suppose will quietly settle at the Baptist Chapel in George St.²⁹

We cannot be sure, but in all probability those who had abandoned Compton Street and (in SPT’s words) were ‘now afloat’ were predominantly the older members of the congregation, and at one point, SPT refers to some fifty of them gathering for prayer and discussing the possibility of a communion service, but on that occasion, SPT made clear his objections to reviving anything like the old Brethren identity of Compton Street and took the opportunity ‘to tell them most distinctly my views in the matter; and that I could not be a party to anything which is intended to be in any sense “an open meeting”.’³⁰

It was a resolution that he maintained, because a year later we find him writing to Newton: ‘I hope that I may be able to keep clear at Plymouth of all ecclesiastical matters; I cannot attend to them and do other things also; and I have my own work.’³¹ So in the last years of his life, prior to his final paralysis, he worshipped either with the Presbyterians (in spite of Joseph Wood’s unpredictable style of preaching) or with the Anglicans at Charles Church under the ministry of his old friend Henry Addington Greaves.³² In describing this as his ultimate ecclesiastical attachment, we hesitate to treat it as SPT’s final considered ideal. Rather was it a question of what was available.³³

12.3.4 The ‘Brethren Nemesis’

In any reading of Tregelles’s letters, one cannot fail to notice, the prevalent recurrence of ecclesiastical issues—particularly those relating to his rejection of what he disparagingly referred to (after 1852) as ‘Brethrenite’ teaching. Even though the little church at Compton Street could no longer be regarded as a Brethren assembly, Tregelles was still obsessed with what he regarded as the errors of ‘Brethrenism’—indeed such matters often distracted him from his efforts to focus on his great textual project. It could even be argued that Brethrenism became his nemesis . As an evangelical in the Reformed tradition, SPT’s commitment to the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ hardly comes as a surprise, but as time went on it became a major doctrinal bone of contention between him and the Brethren. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of evangelical soteriology, but to understand the way the subject at times seemed to consume Tregelles we need to look again at the early Brethren among whom SPT had for a time been numbered.

Although they rejected the traditional credal statements as ‘man- made’ formulations, the early Brethren were only too ready and indeed delighted to investigate at great length and in close detail some of the doctrinal mysteries, which the apostle once described as unsearchable and ‘past finding out’ (Ro.xi.33). Lacking the balance of the creeds , which they rejected , they were particularly prone to stress certain aspects of doctrine at the expense of others. If we forget for a moment the rivalry and clashes of personality that nurtured the division of the late 1840s, we have to recognize that it was in the course of his exposition of the humanity of Christ, that Benjamin Newton gave expression to unguarded opinions concerning the Lord’s mortality that, on reconsideration, he withdrew but which his opponents never allowed him to forget.

Holding in balance such mysteries as the humanity and deity of Jesus has been an ongoing challenge to the Christian church, and—not to put too fine a point on it—when it came to the need for judicious balance, the Brethren were somewhat lacking in equilibrium as well as charity.³⁴ Being a historian, Tregelles was well versed in the early creeds as well as in the Reformed confessions and was deeply troubled by the growing popularity, among other evangelicals, of what he considered to be the unbalanced teaching of the Brethren:

If a turbid stream is confined to its own channel, it may excite but little notice; but if it overflows its banks, causing devastation, and depositing its unfruitful sediment where once there had been fertile soil; and if many are induced to desert clear and healthful springs, in order to drink the muddy and deleterious water, it is high time to shew the difference between what is wholesome and what is poisonous.³⁵

Early in January 1863, SPT learnt that John Darby had produced a pamphlet³⁶ in Toronto dismissing the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness as ‘Newtonianism’. For some months Tregelles pondered as to how best Darby should be answered, but in late August and early September he and his wife spent some time away from home and took lodgings in North Malvern from where he addressed five letters to the Editor of the Record under the general heading: ‘On Recent denials of our Lord’s vicarious life.’ From the very first essay (‘On the Denial that Christ is our Law-fulfiller’), Tregelles made clear that he regarded Darby and the Brethren as a source of false teaching. Put quite simply, Brethren writers were so concerned to emphasize the atoning death of Christ that they had effectively devalued ‘The vicariousness of our Lord’s Life’ which was the title of SPT’s second letter. In a later letter, he makes it still clearer that in his opinion the Brethren’s rejection of the Lord’s vicarious life was in fact a logical consequence of their reluctance to recognize the full humanity and mortality of the Saviour.³⁷

Tregelles can hardly have been surprised when his letters provoked some published replies but one in particular irritated him considerably. At the time of the division in the 1840s, Captain Catesby Paget had sided with the Open Brethren but he had been involved with the Brethren for some years previously.³⁸ In a badly argued reply to SPT’s Five Letters, Paget began by recalling the pamphlet The Blood of the Lamb and the Union of Saints that Tregelles had written more than twenty years earlier—a work full of SPT’s earlier enthusiasm for the Brethren but which he now preferred to forget. With fulsome approval Paget praised the work of SPT’s earlier years: ‘No tract,’ he claimed, ‘has had greater influence in leading Christians away from the traditions of men to hearken to and obey the word of God than this tract of yours’; but then he went on to accuse SPT of now setting the writings of the Reformers ‘above the Scriptures’.³⁹ The situation was not without some irony and SPT’s comment was characteristically sardonic:

He [Paget] tries to convict me of inconsistency because ‘the blood of the Lamb and the union of Saints’ does not treat of imputed righteousness. To this it would be enough to answer that this was not the subject of the tract, and that twenty-four years ago [sc. 1839] I should not have imagined [that] anyone professing orthodox evangelical truth would have denied the doctrine.⁴⁰

We have no reason to pursue SPT any further in this particular aspect of his quest for doctrinal balance, except to observe that this exchange with Paget fittingly exemplifies my earlier suggestion that the Brethren sometimes seemed to be his nemesis . As we saw earlier, just at the point of his separation from the movement, they had captured his interest in Italy where he defended them—eventually to the point of distraction. In England, the situation was similar. Truly, he had difficulty shaking off the skin of his earlier involvement.

12.3.5 Evangelical Isolation

In fact both SPT and Benjamin Newton were becoming increasingly isolated in their refusal to compromise on such issues as plenary inspiration and doctrinal orthodoxy. Their scheme of futurist prophecy was similarly another field of disputed biblical interpretation in which they refused to make any concessions. They were adopting such intransigent positions just when many evangelicals were taking refuge in a more flexible and tolerant approach to disputed truth. In the wider evangelical world, rigorous, hard-line orthodoxy was yielding to a more kindly posture emphasizing experience rather than dogma.

In 1863, when Tregelles attended the seventh of William Pennefather’s annual Barnet Conferences (which were the predecessors of the larger Mildmay Conferences in North London⁴¹), one of his aims in his conversations had been ‘to counter false teaching’ but he noticed that ‘the definite stand for the word of God’ taken by a clergyman⁴² who shared his desire for doctrinal clarity ‘was by no means pleasing to those who advocate dreamy sentimentalism’. A few days later, SPT went a step further referring to William Pennefather’s ‘false spirituality, which might more fittingly be spoken of as ethereality’.⁴³ That his use of words like dreamy sentimentalism and ethereality was perceptive and well founded is apparent from an extract from the report of a later Mildmay Conference, which could have been written—albeit disapprovingly—by SPT himself:

The object of the addresses [in the conferences] has never been theological teaching or clear doctrinal statement, but spiritual lifting and advancement in the Christian life. Worship and practical holiness a step nearer to GOD, and nearer to one another have been the desired attainments.⁴⁴

Such subjectivity would never be acceptable to a man like Tregelles whose long-standing convictions were very well established and therefore not a matter for mere friendly or casual discussion.

12.4 The Magnum Opus and Its Distractions

It will have become evident that the cares we have been describing must have been a hindrance impeding SPT’s focus on his Greek New Testament text. His own health and that of his family, the needs of the Compton Street Church and his published defence of the doctrine of ‘Imputed Righteousness’ were all bound to divert his attention from the magnum opus—distractions, which could only interfere with the completion of the last parts of his planned project. But in treating these cares merely as distractions, we fail to recognize that SPT was honouring what he saw as moral priorities. Family responsibilities, pastoral obligations to an ecclesiastical body with which he had been associated almost since its inception thirty years earlier, and, on a wider front, the vigorous exposition of truths both doctrinal and prophetic, which he believed God had entrusted to him for the nurture of his soul and those of others—these were sacred duties that he was loath to neglect.

12.4.1 Continental Collations

Nevertheless, in spite of such legitimate diversions, the greater project slowly wound its way to completion. As soon as he had fully recuperated from the effects of his stroke , his wife and sister joined forces to take SPT to the continent where their first principal stop, in the summer of 1862, was Leipzig—the home of Tischendorf and a place, which SPT inevitably approached with mixed feelings. Needless to say he was hugely excited to examine the newly discovered Codex Sinaiticus and to make a collation of the Catholic Epistles from it, but he could not forget the unjust accusations with which a few years earlier Tischendorf had publicly blackened his reputation, and even if that matter was now closed, Tischendorf’s behaviour, as we noted in an earlier chapter, was far from agreeable. Even in a letter to Hort’s collaborator, Brooke Foss Westcott, with whom he was far less well-acquainted, SPT did not mince his words:

I have had much to put up with on Tischendorf’s part since I came here: it has been only for the sake of the MS that I have submitted to his extraordinary conduct: but he is now the same to every one: I wish to value his services & not to dwell unduly on other matters.⁴⁵

It was probably at the insistence of his female companions that they then took a break with friends in Halle and visited some places like Wittenberg and the Wartburg, associated with the life of Martin Luther, before travelling by train to Vienna .⁴⁶ From there, they took a steamboat up the Danube to Nuremburg, but it is clear from several of SPT’s letters that the motivation for this last part of the holiday was his own, as Nuremberg was in easy reach of Erlangen, the home of Professor Franz Delitzsch.

Here finally, SPT was able to examine the long lost but newly discovered Codex Reuchlini of the Revelation, which Erasmus had used for the last part of the text of his New Testament.⁴⁷ This must have been an emotional moment for SPT reminding him of the time in the early 1840s when, working on the text of the Apocalypse, he had become increasingly aware of the need for a reliable Greek text of the New Testament as a matter of first priority. The MS used by Erasmus lacked the last six verses of the Apocalypse, so that the Dutch scholar had to translate the text of these verses from the Latin Vulgate, into his own Greek, using some words that occur in no known existing MS, but which can still be found in the textus receptus so highly valued by the advocates of the King James translation.⁴⁸

For SPT, it was a moment of vindication to see the inadequacies of this text, which Erasmus had trusted but which in the 1840s Tregelles had recognized as incomplete. He had been sure that Erasmus must have had difficulty using the MS and now, as he read part of it by candlelight, as Erasmus would have been obliged to do when working hurriedly in January 1516, SPT found that the red markings were very much harder to distinguish than the black ones.⁴⁹ The closure that collating this long-lost MS gave to our punctilious textual scholar is evident in his letter to Newton:

It is a satisfaction to be able to say positively that some of the false readings in the Apocalypse are not in any MS; and that it was by mere blunder that they were introduced into the text.⁵⁰

12.4.2 Diversion in Brittany

It was in one of his letters written during this continental journey that SPT referred in passing to his sister ‘whom we have found a most efficient travelling companion’.⁵¹ Anna Rebecca Tregelles (1811–1885) was two years older than SPT, and we don’t know much about her. At one stage, she took an active philanthropic and evangelistic interest in the welfare of the labourers or navigators (‘navvies’) building the railways and gave an anonymous account of her work which she said was a response to the ‘eloquent appeal’ of Catherine Marsh ‘on behalf of that peculiar race of men, the Railroad Excavators’ whom polite society often treated as subhuman.⁵² We cannot tell to what extent SPT approved of his sister’s philanthropy, which had typically Quaker overtones, and we have little reason to think that they previously had a particularly close sibling relationship.

However, it does seem that on this continental holiday SPT may have bonded with his sister in a new way, because, less than three years later, during one of his visits to his mother in Kingsbridge, Anna Rebecca proposed that the two of them should take a month’s holiday in Brittany in the early summer , and, with SPT’s concurrence (and the encouragement of his physician), they immediately made arrangements.⁵³ It proved to be a great opportunity for SPT to rediscover his earlier interest in Celtic history and literature. In a charming little book, he provided an account of the places and monuments visited on their trip but, being the man he was, he provided more than just history. In a fascinating note on the similarities of Welsh to Breton (and sometimes Cornish!) vocabulary, he emphasizes the impossibility of this leading to anything more than a minimal form of conversation and then (as one would expect from SPT), he raises the whole question of what was required for evangelism in Brittany to be truly effective.⁵⁴

For both SPT and his sister, it must have been a refreshing experience, though by the end of it Anna Rebecca may have had enough of her brother’s phenomenal ability to remember the Celtic details of who was who and what was what in mediaeval and early modern times. For him, it may have been yet one more distraction from the great work in which he was engaged, but one suspects that he returned to the minutiae of his textual work, invigorated by the broader brushstrokes of wider historical issues and their significance.

12.4.3 An Oxford Break

By the mid-1860s, much less of SPT’s textual work was focused on collation and instead he was of necessity devoting most of his energies to preparing and proof-reading his text and apparatus for publication, the third part of which (the Acts and the Catholic Epistles) appeared in print in 1865. However, for the Pauline Epistles (most of which would be published as the fourth part in January 1869), SPT reckoned in October 1865 that one further collation was needed. Described by Griesbach in 1793 and preserved in the Bodleian, there was an eleventh-century cursive MS of which the text ‘appeared [to Tregelles] to be worthy of particular attention’.⁵⁵ There was possibly, however, an ulterior motive in SPT’s interest in the MS as it gave him an excuse to visit Oxford where he had several trusted friends who appreciated his scholarship—the sort of academics of whose company he was bereft in Plymouth—and who would also be able to boost the number of subscribers to his work.

For some reason, his intimate friend Benjamin Newton had always avoided returning to his alma mater and whenever Tregelles visited Oxford , he always made a point of passing on to Newton the latest ‘news’ as he picked it up from the few remaining dons who had known Newton back in the 1820s and 1830s, and this made SPT’s visits all the more purposeful. J. D. Macbride [1778–1868],⁵⁶ the Principal of Magdalen Hall, and Benjamin Symons [1785–1878], the Warden of Wadham, were conservative evangelicals with whom SPT was thankful to share some of his anxieties concerning current theological scholarship, and he had other friends like John Prideaux Lightfoot,⁵⁷ [1803–1887] the Rector of Exeter and Robert Scott [1811–1887] the philologist who had been elected as Master of Balliol by a single vote over the liberal and heterodox Benjamin Jowett—most surely to SPT’s relief!⁵⁸ Dons like these appreciated a visit from the genial and knowledgeable scholar from Plymouth and gave him a warm welcome. Contrary to what one might have expected, SPT was far from being a dry and dusty ‘stick-in-the-mud’ and as we noted earlier could be a very entertaining dinner-guest.

12.4.4 The Canon Muratorianus : An Exercise in Apologetics

It was during this visit to Oxford that Tregelles resurrected his earlier plan to publish a facsimile edition of the Canon Muratorianus, the text of which he had traced in 1857 when he was in Milan.⁵⁹ Subsequent communications with the Ambrosian Librarian Dr. Antonio Ceriani had been hampered in 1859 by the war between France and Austria, which accompanied the beginnings of Italian Unification, and after this the project was halted—seemingly indefinitely—by SPT’s paralysis in 1861. He later explained that during his time in Oxford in 1865 ‘Dr Scott and others urged me to get my notes into form and completeness’,⁶⁰ and once again a rival project seems to have distracted SPT’s focus on the magnum opus. Of course the Greek Text of the New Testament was not completely abandoned but although the fourth volume (published in January 1869) was devoted to the corpus paulinum, it did not include the Pastoral Epistles or the letter to the Hebrews, which were only published after his second stroke , and the Muratorian project may well have preoccupied him.

Once again we can observe our subject’s conflicted sense of duty. His Greek New Testament was always the project of prime importance, but as a devout Christian he was loath to shirk other responsibilities like his efforts on behalf of the Compton Street chapel and his devotion to the cause of defending the faith against what he considered to be false doctrine. The same sense of obligation came into play with the Muratorian Canon. For thirty years, SPT had felt that Christian Apologetics was a field in which he had a part to play, and now he perceived his duties to be unchanged.

In 1851, he had delivered a much-quoted lecture to the Plymouth YMCA on the Historic Evidence of … the New Testament⁶¹ and in it he had made repeated use of the list of canonical books contained in the eighth-century fragment found by Ludovico Muratori [1672–1750] in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. In the judgement of Tregelles, the text of this Milanese fragment that he had carefully traced in 1857 was a valuable witness to the validity of the documentary transmission of the New Testament. In 1865, a critical edition of the Muratori fragment might be a distraction from his magnum opus but it was a logical counterpart to the earlier defence he had made of the authenticity of the New Testament and its message. His motive is encapsulated in the motto that SPT included on the title page of his edition of the Canon Muratorianus. Here, we are reminded of Pericles’ insistence (as recorded by Thucydides) that having understanding is in effect useless if one cannot explain it to others.⁶² SPT’s convictions as to the authenticity of the New Testament documents were not in question, but it was part of his Christian testimony to explain them.⁶³ Such work may have been a distraction from the greater project, but clearly SPT considered it to be a duty.⁶⁴