WETSTEIN, JOHN JAMES, a learned biblical critic,
Wetter was born at Basel in 1693. On his admission to the ministry, he maintained a thesis, "De variis Novi Testamenti Lectionibus," in which he showed that the great variety of readings of the New Testament affords no argument against the authenticity of the text. He had made these various readings the object of his attention, and travelled into foreign countries to examine all the manuscripts he could find. In 1730, he published Prolegomena ad Novi Testamenti Graci Editionem, accuratissimam, &c. Some divines, dreading his unsettling the present text, procured a decree of the senate of Basel against his undertaking, and even got him prohibited from officiating in the ministry; on which he went to Amsterdam, where the Remonstrants named him to succeed the famous Le Clerc, then superannuated, as professor of philosophy and history. His edition of the New Testament he published in 1752, in 2 vols. folio. He left the text as he found it, placing the various readings, with a critical commentary, underneath; subjoining two supposed epistles of Clemens Romanus, discovered by him in a Syriac manuscript of the New Testament, but which have since been proved to be spurious. He died at Amsterdam in 1754.