Epigraphs
Rightly understood . . . Joseph Barber Lightfoot, historian and theologian, Christian and bishop, can still become our tutor today.
Martin Hengel, “Bishop Lightfoot and the Tübingen School on the Gospel of John in the Second Century”
There was a peculiar fitness in the time that was selected for the revelation of Messiah to his people. But can we venture a step beyond, and say that we see in the popular mind of the day the germ of a natural development of the Christian scheme? The voice of prophecy had been silent for four centuries, but it was felt to be as the death-like stillness that precedes the hurricane. Hence, men with busy whisperings were anxiously looking for the coming of that great Terrible Day of the Lord which, amidst many horrors, was yet to bring their deliverance.
J. B. Lightfoot, “Lessons of History from the Cradle of Christianity”
For there is a testimony which it is not in the power of historical criticism to grasp, the testimony of the heart which finds in Christianity its deepest aspirations realized and its fondest hopes fulfilled, the testimony of a conscience smitten and pierced, as by a sharp two-edged sword, by the record of His words ‘who spake as no man spake,’ the testimony of experience which reminds the Christian that in proportion as he has cultivated his best faculties and highest feelings of his nature, the clouds of doubt and difficulty have been dispersed before the ‘light of the Spirit which bears witness to his spirit,’ and have only gathered again when he has been betrayed into spiritual carelessness or moral ambiguity.
J. B. Lightfoot, “Lessons of History from the Cradle of Christianity”
In an even earlier lecture than that on Lightfoot, to which I have already referred, I described the way in which Lightfoot, Westcott, and Hort divided up the New Testament with a view to writing commentaries on the whole. . . . The Chapter Library at Durham contains a quantity of [unpublished] manuscript material which is interesting in that it shows both how probably the most popular teacher of theology at Cambridge in his time prepared and presented his material, and also how the finished commentaries took shape.
C. K. Barrett