A Forgotten Pioneer: Granville Penn and the Victory of Vaticanus

Granville Penn (1761-1844) was an amateur textual critic, who intended to revise the English translation of the new Testament, and brought in evidence from Codex Vaticanus (B03) in order to support his argument. Already in the nineteenth century his work was largely forgotten, but it does form evidence of the growing scholarly estimation of the manuscript in his day. Penn's numerous conjectures offer an interesting view of his approach, and his revision project casts light on the intellectual climate of the time. The fact that he was one of the first to recognize the importance of B03, but did not have a lasting impact on text-critical scholarship, indicates that he was a pioneer who correctly estimated the importance of this one manuscript, but worked in isolation.