Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar

W. Ward Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar. A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966. pp.95. Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament Baker Studies in Biblical Archaeology by W. Ward Gasque Foreword by F. F. Bruce Baker Book House Grand Rapids, Michigan Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-18312 Copyright, 1966, by Baker Book House Company First printing, August 1966 Second printing, August 1967 W. Ward Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar. A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966. pp.95. CONTENTS Foreword 7 Preface 10 List of Abbreviations 12 Chapter I. An Introduction to the Man and His Work 13 II. Luke the Historian 23 III. Paul the Missionary Statesman 38 IV. The Seven Churches of Asia 48 V. Potpourri 56 VI. Conclusion 61 Appendix I. A Chronological List of Ramsay’s Major Works 66 II. An Index of Select Subjects from Ramsay’s Major Works 68 III. Index of Scripture References from Ramsay’s Works 74 IV. An Index of Greek Terms from Ramsay’s Works 76 V. A Summer Journey in Asia Minor” by William M. Ramsay 78 Bibliography 86 Index 92 W. Ward Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar. A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966. pp.95. [p.7] FOREWORD Although Sir William Ramsay’s life and mine overlapped by thirty years, and we belonged to the same university, we never met. Seventeen years before I started my undergraduate career in the University of Aberdeen, he had retired from the Chair of Humanity (Latin) there, and lived for the rest of his life in Edinburgh. Once, in my schoolboy days, I received indirectly a piece of advice from him―that I should beware of dissipating my intellectual energies, as this had been the downfall of many promising young Scots. I have remembered his advice; I am not so sure that I have followed it. Many of my teachers, at school and university, were pupils of Ramsay, products of the classical discipline inculcated by him and his colleague John Harrower, Professor of Greek. (Harrower was inducted to the Greek Chair in the same year, 1886, as Ramsay became professor of Humanity; but while Ramsay retired in 1911 at the then inordinately early age of sixty, Harrower continued in the Greek Chair for forty-five years in all, until the infirmities of old age compelled him to relinquish it). Of Ramsay and Harrower, two of their distinguished pupils have written: No two men could be more unlike; undergraduate rumour had it, many years afterwards, that they were personally unacquainted. Yet, all unconsciously, they made an ideal combination―how effective many of us realized only long afterwards―and between them they built up a school of classical learning which had no equal, outside Oxford and Cambridge, in Britain. Ramsay’s contribution to the Aberdeen Classical School was the inspiration of a gifted maker of knowledge; Harrower’s was that of a great teacher. What either lacked the other was there to supply. When Ramsay translated di deaeque omnes as “all ye inhabitants of heaven, male and female,” we felt that it didn’t really matter, for we could have told him, as Grecians, how those things were clone. When Harrower, for he too was human, began to make Pericles’ Funeral Speech look like a Greek Version gone wrong, we kept our heads, for Ramsay had taught us how to handle a document.1 Another of Ramsay’s pupils who has recently given some account of his performance as a teacher (the late Dr. Alexander Ross, until recently Associate Editor of The Evangelical Quarterly) describes the occasion when Ramsay’s knighthood was announced. [p.8] The news of the conferring of this honour reached us one morning in November 1906 and that morning the Latin classroom was crowded, all the available sitting and standing space being occupied, most of those present having forsaken their proper classes for the occasion. When the professor entered, there was a burst of vociferous cheering, handkerchiefs and note books being waved wildly in the air. When the deafening noise had at last been stilled, he was invited to make a speech. According to a newspaper report which I have before me, he said: “Ladies’ and gentlemen (loud cheers), I am afraid I am detaining a large number of you from your classes (cries of ‘No, no,’ and ‘not at all’). I and glad to see that for once you seem to enjoy the atmosphere of the Humanity classroom (cheers and cries of ‘Oh, oh, Sir William’)―as I am afraid that on many occasions it has been a place of terror (loud cries of ‘No’)―a vale of tears, through which you had to pass on your pilgrimage through this University.” Later on, there was an allusion to the students who, by carving their names on 1 W. M. Calder and J. Fraser, Aberdeen University Review, March 1934, pp. 104 f. W. Ward Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar. A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966. pp.95. the desks, planned to leave “a memorial of their former presence on these benches for future generations to discover.” At this point a voice called out “excavations!”―a manifest reference to far more important excavations in Asia Minor.2 Mr. Gasque’s study, however, is concerned with Ramsay’s contributions to New Testament study. These were many-sided and valuable. He had received no biblical or theological training, but he acquired, by flint of his painstaking archaeological research coupled with his mastery of first-century literature, an unrivalled knowledge of the historical and geographical background of the apostolic age, especially where Asia Minor was concerned, and he used that knowledge effectively to illuminate the New Testament. The nineteenth-century Ramsay was a very great man; if even then he was inclined to overstate his case, at least he had a good case to overstate. The twentieth-century Ramsay suffered in his scholarly reputation because he allowed himself to be persuaded by Sir William Robertson Nicoll to don the mantle of a popular apologist. That Ramsay was no “fundamentalist” is evident to any careful reader of that section of St. Paul the Traveller which deals with the first five chapters of Acts, but this section comes near the end of the book, and probably a large proportion of his devout reading public never got so far. It is no disgrace for a scholar to obtain a reputation as a defender of the faith, but when this reputation is gained by covering reams of paper with apologetic material, spreading the factual content out as thin as possible to make it go farther, it is apt to be gained at the expense of his reputation for pure scholarship. The twentieth-century Ramsay tended to be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention by many Neutestamentler who never made themselves acquainted with the solid achievements of the nineteenth-century Ramsay, which underlay his [p.9] more popular work of later years. Whatever may be thought of the superstructure, the foundation was always sound, and even in his most ill-considered work one constantly comes across flashes of insight and original contributions to knowledge which one would not willingly have missed. A quarter of a century after his death the time is opportune for a reassessment of his work, and I am glad to commend Mr. Gasque’s reassessment to readers who have a concern for New Testament scholarship. F. F. Bruce 2 A. Ross, Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, April 1962, p. 69. W. Ward Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay: Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar. A Survey of His Contribution to the Study of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1966. pp.95. [p.10] PREFACE One of the surprising facts in the history of New Testament criticism is the small amount of attention that has been given to the work of Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (1851-1939). In the preface to the second edition of his commentary on the Greek text of Acts, Prof. F. F. Bruce remarked that he is “repeatedly amazed by modern writers who deal with areas of New Testament scholarship to which Ramsay made contributions of peculiar value, with hardly so much as a hint that such a person ever lived.”1 Writing twelve years later, Bishop Stephen Neill also observed this continued neglect.2 As far as I have been able to determine, the only study hitherto which has been devoted to an account of his life and work is a brief essay by W. F. Howard, first published in the journal Religion in Life in 1939 and later reprinted as a chapter in his book The Romance of New Testament Scholarship.3 My introduction to Ramsay came in a college course in biblical archaeology. Since my first reading, I have become a devotee. My interest in his work was heightened by a brief visit to Asiatic Turkey and the cities of Paul in the summer of 1962. In his above-mentioned essay Howard suggests that it would be a fine discipline for a young scholar, who wishes to specialize in New Testament studies, to go through Ramsay’s published books and to compile a careful index of all Greek words dealt with, and another of all subject-matter that concerns the New Testament and early Christian history.4 I may be the first person to have taken up his challenge; at least, I am the first person to have done so and to publish the results.

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