Campbells Gospels

George Campbell (1719–96) was a minister of the Church of Scotland, theologian, and principal of Marischal College. He wrote a number of theological works, including a defense of miracles in response to David Hume, and was noted for originality of argument as well as charity towards his opponents. This translation of the Gospels was first published in England in 1789; the work consists of a preface and preliminary dissertations, the actual translation, and the notes, with the whole being very scholarly, resorting frequently to the Greek in the dissertations and notes.

George Campbell is now remembered primarily for The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776). Here he employed the Scottish Enlightenment’s developing science of human nature to explain the effectiveness of the classical rules of rhetoric. He did this by relating the various ends of persuasive discourse to the natural faculties and propensities of the human mind. In his own time Campbell was better known as a religious apologist, using an enlightened theory of evidence in A Dissertation on Miracles (1762) to defend the believability of Christian miracles against the sceptical attack of David Hume.