Edwin Palmer (1824–1895) was an English churchman and academic, Corpus Professor of Latin at Oxford from 1870 to 1878[1] and archdeacon of Oxford from 1878 to his death.[2]
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His father William Jocelyn Palmer was rector of Mixbury in Oxfordshire. His mother Dorothea was daughter of the Rev. William Roundell of Gledstone, Yorkshire; there were six sons and four daughters, and William Palmer and Roundell Palmer were his two eldest brothers.[3][4]
At Oxford, he met William Stubbs, who was his future bishop when he became archdeacon, at the Hermes debating society, and they became lifelong friends.[5] As a Fellow of Balliol College he was one of an influental group of liberal theologians in the college: Benjamin Jowett, T. H. Green and William Lambert Newman were others.[6] With Edward Charles Wickham he started the intercollegiate lectures in the university.[7] Oliver Wendell Holmes was his guest at Balliol in 1866.[8] In 1870, with his Latin professorship, he became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.[9]
He set off on travel for his heath during the winter of 1849/50 with his brother William in the Levant, meeting Alexandros Mavrokordatos in Athens and visiting Smyrna to see Yevfimy Putyatin. They went on to Damascus and Jerusalem.[10] Returning, they visited Mount Athos.[11] The trip ended back in England in August 1850, with Edwin Palmer in better health.[12]
In 1881 Palmer edited the Greek New Testament, producing a text that is supposed to be the basis of the Revised Version. Starting from a text of 1550, it conservatively made alterations only where the textus receptus was clearly wrong in the view of the revising team. The 1910 edition by Alexander Souter reproduces Palmer's text.[13] Charles John Ellicott wrote that there were at most 64 readings, not found in the textus receptus, Karl Lachmann, Constantin von Tischendorf, or Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, that were taken from The New Testament in the Original Greek, the 1881 text of Fenton John Anthony Hort and Brooke Westcott.[14] Palmer was assisted by Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener.[15]
He married Henrietta, daughter of Rev. James Riddell; Edwin James Palmer was their son, and they had two daughters.[16]