WESTCOTT, BROOKE Foss. - Protestant exegete, b. at Birmingham on 12 Jan. 1825, d. at Auckland on 27 July 1901. He studied at Cambridge (1844-48), where in 1870 he graduated in theology, having already been ordained an Anglican minister (1851).
In the same year he taught at Cambridge as Regius Professor; in 1881 he was appointed a member of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, in 1884 canon of Westminster, and in 1890 bishop of Durham as successor to his friend Lightfoot, with whom he had collaborated.
Among W.’s works, some of which are of a popular and moral nature, the following may be mentioned: A general survey of the history of the Canon of the New Testament (London 1855; 7th ed. ibid. 1896); An introduction to the study of the Gospels (ibid. 1860); A general view of the English Bible (ibid. 1868; 3rd ed. ibid. 1905); The Gospel according to St. John (first published in 1880 in the Holy Bible edited by Cook and then separately in London in 1908); The Epistles of St. John (ibid. 1883; 5th ed. ibid. 1905); The Epistle to the Hebrews (ibid. 1889; 3rd ed. ibid. 1906). In these and other works W. appears as a keen exegete, free from bold hypotheses and very attentive to textual criticism. In this latter field, in collaboration with F. J. A. Hort, he produced a valuable edition of the New Testament (The New Test. in the original Greek, 2 vols., Cambridge-London 1890-96; vol. I contains the text and vol. II a lengthy introduction and appendix). Only his modern edition of the Gospel of St. Mark, edited by S. C. E. Legg (Oxford 1935), has appeared.