Abbot, Ezra, Dd, Lld

Abbot, Ezra, D.D., LL.D.

a distinguished Unitarian scholar, was born at Jackson, Maine, April 18, 1819. He studied at Phillips Academy, Exeter, N.H.; graduated from Bowdoin College in 1840; taught for about five years at East Machias, Maine; removed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1847; in 1856 became assistant librarian of Harvard University, and in 1872 professor of New- Test. criticism, a position which he retained until his death, March 21, 1884. In 1855 Dr. Abbot edited Andrew Norton's posthumous Translation of the Gospels, and in 1856 Norton's Statement of the Reasons for not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians. In 1864 he published his Literature of the Doctrine of Future Life, in which he gave a list of more than five thousand works on that subject. In 1865 he edited Lawson's Church of the First Three Centuries, and in 1866 Orme's Memoir of the Controversy on the Three Heavenly Witnesses. In 1860 he edited and revised Hudson's Critical Greek and English Concordance of the New Testament. He was one of the writers for the American edition of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, and his additions to the bibliography of that work are exceedingly valuable. He gave substantial aid to the Reverend Dr. Noyes in his Translation of the New Testament, which was published in 1869. His work on The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel: External Evidences, brought out in 1880, is well-known to European and American scholars. Among his last labors was the assistance which he gave to Dr. C.R. Gregory, of Leipsic, in the preparation of his Prolegomena to Tischendorf's last critical edition of the Greek Test. Dr. Abbot was also a voluminous contributor to the periodical literature of the day, in Europe and America. He was a member of the American Bible Revision Committee. In the special department of Biblical literature he stood among the foremost scholars of the present day, and in textual criticism he was probably superior to any other in America. He was a man of singular modesty and disinterestedness, and was endowed with an almost unlimited capacity for work, possessing withal the qualities of thoroughness and accuracy, and in all his studies was more anxious to learn the truth than to establish any foregone conclusion.