Cyfieithiad Briscoe New Testament and OT Portions

Thomas Briscoe was born in Wrexham in north Wales in 1813 and educated at Ruthin. He then studied at Jesus College, Oxford, which traditionally recruited students from Wales. He gained a first class Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1833, and was appointed Fellow of Jesus College in 1834. He gained his Master of Arts (MA) in 1836. Briscoe was ordained as an Anglican deacon in 1836, and as a priest in 1837. He ministered at Henllan, Denbighshire until 1840. He then returned to Oxford and gained his Bachelor of Divinity (BD) 1858. Briscoe was an excellent scholar and tutor in the biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek. As well as his native Welsh he also knew English, French and German. Briscoe left Oxford in 1858 and spent the rest of his life as vicar of Holyhead on Anglesey. From 1877 he was also Chancellor of Bangor Cathedral. He died unmarried in Holyhead in 1895 aged 82. Whilst he was at Oxford, Briscoe became an admirer of the work of Bishop Lowth, Oxford professor of poetry, who had translated Isaiah in 1778. This translation kept the original poetry of the text in English and was greatly admired and reprinted many times. Briscoe wanted to do the same in Welsh. In 1853 Briscoe completed his own poetic translation of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah from Hebrew, using Bishop Lowthʼs principles. It was published in London in 1854. Briscoeʼs translation of Isaiah was followed by his translations from Hebrew of the Book of Psalms and the Book of Proverbs published together in 1854, and then the Book of the Patriarch Job published in 1855. In 1881 when the Church of England produced the English Revised Version of the New Testament, Briscoe hoped that the Welsh Bishops would commission a similar project in Welsh. Whilst Briscoe was vicar of Holyhead, he translated the New Testament from Greek, which followed the readings of the English Revised Version. In 1894 when it became clear that there would not be an official Welsh Revised Version, Briscoe published his own translation from Greek, at Bangor. Briscoeʼs Old Testament books were scanned from copies in the Bible Society collection at Cambridge University. The New Testament was scanned with thanks to the Special Collections and Archives at Cardiff University. These were digitised by the Bible Society, and then checked and proof-read by Arfon Jones in 2020. All these books of the Bible which were translated by Briscoe (i.e. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah and the New Testament) have been combined and called: Thomas Briscoeʼs Translation 1894 (Cyfieithiad Briscoe 1894). This digital collection was produced by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 2020-21.