Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 22:1 (NA 1971)
Article: The Later Ramsay
Author: Colin J. Hemer

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TynBul 22:1 (1971) p. 119

The Later Ramsay

A Supplementary Bibliography Of The Published Writings Of Sir William Mitchell Ramsay

C. J. Hemer

Several recent writers have called attention to the unhappy neglect of the achievement of Sir William Mitchell Ramsay,¹ even though his indirect influence has permeated British scholarship, especially with regard to the Acts of the Apostles. His later reputation both as apologist and controversialist has cast a shadow over his whole personality and work.

The bibliography attached to the Festschrift Anatolian Studies Presented to Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, ed. W. H. Buckler and W. M. Calder (Manchester, 1923), is a most valuable tool for the study both of the antiquities of Asia Minor and of the New Testament. There is also some valuable material and a selective topical bibliography of Ramsay’s principal works in the recent study by W. Ward Gasque. But there is no systematic list available of the writings of his last years, between 1923 and his death in 1939.

These were not Ramsay’s best or his most productive years. Many of his faults are seen at their plainest in them. Sharp insights are mingled with discursive speculations. He returns obsessively and argumentatively to old themes like the South Galatian debate. He did not mellow with age: in commenting on the publications of a colleague who had offended him he writes: ‘They rank as the worst epigraphic articles that the world has ever seen.’

One cannot, however, afford to neglect the later Ramsay. His mastery of his material is the fruit of sixty years of the study of inner Anatolia. And these writings, with all their

¹ F. F. Bruce, The Acts of the Apostles,² Tyndale Press, London (1952) viii; S. Neill, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861-1961, OUP, London (1964) 545; W. W. Gasque, Sir William M. Ramsay. Archaeologist and New Testament Scholar, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids (1964) 10.

TynBul 22:1 (1971) p. 120

faults, are almost exclusively concerned with the archaeology and epigraphy of Asia Minor, the field in which his competence could not be questioned. They are incidentally very rich in their illumination of the world of the New Testament. And even his book reviews are frequently the vehicle for detailed epigraphical discussions.

The present bibliography is arranged in three parts. In the first I have placed for convenience some bibliographical and biographical notices of Ramsay by others. The second part is occasioned by the discovery that the list of his works compiled by his daughter in 1923, extensive as it is, is incomplete. In particular it omits several series of contributions to t...

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