DR. JAMES MOFFATT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21396, 20 October 1934, Page 19

DR. JAMES MOFFATT

NOTED THEOLOGIAN VISIT TO NEW ZEALAND A BRILLIANT CAREER A visit to the South Island is to bo included in the itinerary of the Rev. Dr. James Moffatt, the distinguished Biblical scholar and translator, who, with Mrs. Moffatt, is expected at Auckland on November 17. After leaving Auckland on November 19 he will spend a week in the Hotorua district fishing and sightseeing, and then go to Levin, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. They will return to Auckland to join the Aorangi for Vancouver on December 11. They left England qbout the end of August to visit a son in Burma, and another in Java.

"Dr. James Moffatt is perhaps the most encyclopaedic scholar among English-speaking theologians of our time," writes Principal John Dickie, of the Presbyterian Theological College. "Certainly no one has done so much to make generally known the results of modern research in the departments of Biblical study and of early Christian history, though his main strength has been devoted to tho New Testament. "Ho was born in Glasgow in 1870. After an exceptionally brilliant career at school, university and theological college in his native city, he was ordained to the Free Church of Dundonald, Ayrshire, in 1596. There he had as a near neighbour, E. F. Scott, of the United Presbyterian Church at Prestwick, now his colleague in the Union Seminary, Now York. In 1900 he published his Historical New Testament, by which he gained at once an assured position among the New Testament scholars of his generation. Shortly afterwards the University of St. Andrews niiide him an honorary Doctor of Divin-ity-—the youngest Scottish D.D. within living momory. In 1907 he went to Broughty Ferry to the church which, 10 before, Dr. Denney had left for the New Testament Chair in the United Free College in Glasgow. "Dr. Moffatt was Bruce Lecturer in London in 1907'; and Hibbert Lecturer at London and Cambridge in 1921. In 1911 he succeeded Dr. Alexander Souter as Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis in Mansfield College, Oxford. In 1915 he returned to Glasgow as successor to Principal Lindsay in the chair of Church History in the United Free College. He remained in that position until 1927, when he accepted a call to his present office as Washburn Professor of Church History in the Uqion Theological Seminary, New York.

"He has so many university degrees that it would be superfluous to try to enumerate them. But one is so rare among non-Anglicans that it deserves special mention, the D.D. of Oxford University. This honour he shares, so far as I can remember, with only one other Presbyterian, Dr. H. R. Mackintosh. All New Zealanders who are at all interested in theolocy rejoice that we are to have an opportunity, however short, of seeing and hearing Dr. Moffatt."