John Mill (theologian)

John Mill ( * 1645, † June 23, 1707 ) was an English theologian.

Mill was born about 1645 in Shap in Westmorland and attended Queen's College in Oxford. There he became a member in 1661 and earned his master's degree in 1669. In the same year he spoke the " Oratio Panegyrica " at the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre. In 1676 he was chaplain to the Bishop of Oxford and acquired in 1681 the Rector of Bletchington, Oxfordshire, where he was elevated to the chaplain of Charles II. From 1685 until his death he was director of St Edmund Hall. In 1704 he was nominated by Queen Anne for a Prebendal stall in the cathedral of Canterbury. He died two weeks after the publication of his Greek Testament.

In 1707 Mill brought his novelty testamentum graecum cum lectionibus variantibus MSS. exemplarium, versionun, editionum SS patrum et scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, et in easdem Nolis (Oxford, fol. 1707) out, which he had taken with great support from John Fell in attack, his predecessor in the textual criticism of the New Testament field. The completion took 30 years and was a great improvement over the previous teaching. The text of the output corresponds to the Textus Receptus of the Editio Regia by Robert Estienne in 1550, but it contains many observations, including all pre-existing collections of various readings, as well as a large number of additional readings which he had gathered in the investigation of other manuscripts themselves. There were oriental versions, this he used but only in the Latin translations.

In 1710, Ludolph Küster brought out a reprint of Mills Testament in Amsterdam, which was expanded to include the readings of 12 other manuscripts ( Dibdin ). More titles editions followed in 1723 and 1746, with only the front page was changed.