ABBOT, EZRA (1819-1884), American biblical scholar, was born at Jackson, Me., April 28, 1819. He graduated at Bowdoin college in 1840; and, after being principal of a public school in Cambridge, became assistant librarian of Harvard university, and from 1872 until his death Bussey Professor of New Testa ment Criticism and Interpretation in the Harvard divinity school. His studies were chiefly in oriental languages and the textual criticism of the New Testament, though he was a remarkable bibliographer. His publications were largely dispersed in the pages of reviews and other publications, but to the enlarged American edition of Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1867-70), he contributed more than 400 articles besides greatly improving the bibliographical completeness of the work. His principal single production, representing his scholarly method and con servative conclusions, was The Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (188o, second edition, by J. H. Thayer, with other essays, 1889), up to that time probably the ablest defence, based on external evidence, of the Johannine authorship, and certainly the most complete treatment of the relation of Justin Martyr to this gospel. He died in Cambridge, Mass., March 21, 1884.
See S. J. Barrows, Ezra Abbot (1884).