Wetstein

Wetstein, JOHANN JAKOB, a great New Testament scholar, was born in Basel, March 5, 1693. At an early age he gave himself to the studies of his life, and after travelling in France and England he returned in 1720 to become assistant to his father in St Leonard's Church at Basel. He continued the study of the New Testament text, and his boldness and originality soon brought him under suspicion of heterodoxy. His rejection of the θεός for ὁ in the textus receptus of 1 Tim. iii. 16—now admitted by all who know anything of exegesis—was denounced as an attempt to destroy one of the buttresses of Christ's divinity, and Wetstein was deposed for alleged Socinianism (1730). But in 1733 he was called to the chair of Church History in the Remonstrants' College at Amsterdam, and there he lived till his death, March 22, 1754. The prolegomena to his famous edition of the Greek Testament appeared anonymously in 1730; the text followed in two volumes folio, 1751-52. See L. Meister, Helvetische Szenen der neueren Schwärmerei und Intoleranz (Zur. 1785).