John Mill (theologian)

[2] Mill was born circa 1645 at Shap in Westmorland, entered Queen's College, Oxford, as a servitor in 1661, and took his master's degree in 1669 in which year he spoke the "Oratio Panegyrica" at the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre.

1707) was undertaken with the encouragement of John Fell, his predecessor in the field of New Testament criticism; it took thirty years to complete and was a great advance on previous scholarship.

The text is that of Robertus Stephanus (1550), but the notes, besides including all previously existing collections of various readings, add a vast number derived from his own examination of many new manuscripts, and Oriental versions (the latter of which he used only in the Latin translations).

Although the amount of information given by Mill is small compared with that in modern editions, it is probable that no one, except perhaps Tischendorf, has added so much material for the work of textual criticism.

He was the first to notice the value of the concurrence of the Latin evidence with the Codex Alexandrinus, the only representative of an ancient non-Western Greek text then sufficiently known; this hint was not lost on Bentley.