As a result of the inaccuracy of existing editions of the Vulgate, the delegates of Oxford University Press accepted in 1878 a proposal from classicist John Wordsworth to produce a critical edition of the New Testament. This was eventually published as Nouum Testamentum Domini nostri Iesu Christi Latine, secundum editionem sancti Hieronymi in three volumes between 1889 and 1954. Along with Wordsworth and Henry Julian White, the completed work lists on its title pages Alexander Ramsbotham, Hedley Frederick Davis Sparks, Claude Jenkins, and Arthur White Adams. As preliminary work to the full edition, Wordsworth published the text of certain important manuscripts in the series Old-Latin Biblical Texts, with the help of William Sanday, H. J. White, and other scholars. Wordsworth was consecrated Bishop of Salisbury in 1885, and White assumed co-editorship of the edition, which was published in fascicles beginning with the Gospel of Matthew in 1889; the first volume, with an extensive epilogue discussing the history of the manuscripts and the text, was completed in 1898. In the gospel volumes, the Oxford editors printed an interlinear text from the Codex Brixianus, believing this to represent the most likely representative of Jerome's Old Latinsource text; but subsequent studies linking the Codex Brixianus to the Gothic version of the New Testament make this supposition unlikely. Acts, forming the beginning of the third volume, was published in 1905. In 1911, Wordsworth and White produced a smaller editio minor with the complete text of the New Testament and a limited apparatus, but using modern punctuation. In the subsequent publication of main editions of the Epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Ephesians the text of the editio minor was revised slightly; but for the rest of the New Testament the 1911 editio minor text is retained unchanged, publication consisting in the presentation of a full critical apparatus. Wordsworth died in 1911. Even with the death of some of those involved in the project during the First World War, the second volume had been published as far as the Second Epistle to the Corinthians by 1926. In 1933, White enlisted Sparks to assist him in the work, who after White's death in 1934 assumed primary responsibility for the edition. After its completion, he served on the editorial board for the Stuttgart edition of the Vulgate, beginning in 1959.
