Burnett Hillman Streeter


Burnett Hillman Streeter was a British biblical scholar and textual critic.

Life

Streeter was born in London and educated at The Queen's College, Oxford. He was ordained in 1899 and was a member of the Archbishop's Commission on Doctrine in the Church of England. In 1910, Streeter formed a group of Oxford dons known as The Group, which met weekly to discuss theological topics. He attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally. He wrote a dozen volumes in the fields of philosophy of religion, comparative religion, and New Testament textual studies.
He was Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford from 1932 to 1933, when he became Provost of Queen's College.
The most important work of Streeter was The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins, in which he proposed a "four-document hypothesis" as a new solution to the synoptic problem. In this work, he also developed the theory of "local texts" in the manuscript transmission of the New Testament. Johann Leonhard Hug was his forerunner.
Streeter found a new textual family: Caesarean text-type. He remarked a close textual relationship between Codex Sinaiticus and Vulgate of Jerome.
Streeter and his wife, Irene, were the only passengers on a Koolhoven FK.50, HB-AMO which crashed into Mount Kelleköpfli on a flight from Basel to Bern on 10 September 1937. The crew started the descent to Basel in low visibility due to foggy conditions. The plane hit Mount Kelleköpfli located near Waldenburg, 25 kilometers southeast from the Basel airport. The pilot Walter Eberschweiler and the Streeters were killed immediately, while the radio operator/navigator Hans Huggler survived the accident, but was severely injured.

Works