BUXTORF or BUXTORFF, JOHANNES son of the preceding, concentrated on theological and Semitic studies, and in 1622 published at Basle a Lexicon Chaldaicum et Syriacum, as a companion work to his father's great Rabbinical Bible. On the death of his father in 1629, he was unanimously designated his successor in the Hebrew professorship at Basle, where he remained till his death. In 1647 a third theological professorship was founded specially for him, but when the pro fessorship of the Old Testament became vacant in 1654, Buxtorf accepted that chair instead.
Much of Buxtorf's public life was spent in controversy on biblical criticism. The Reformed churches at this time, having renounced the dogma of an infallible church, thought it necessary to maintain that of an infallible Bible and, as the necessary foundation of this, of a Bible handed down from the earliest ages without textual alteration. Even the vowel points and accents were held to have been given by divine inspiration. The Masso retic text of the Old Testament, therefore, as compared with that of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint or the Vulgate, alone contained the true words of the sacred writers. Although many of the Reformers, as well as learned Jews, had long seen that these views could not be made good, there had been as yet no formal controversy. Louis Cappel (q.v.) was the first to dispel these illusions by a work on the modern origin of the vowel points and accents, published anonymously in 1624, under the title Arcanum Punctationis revelatum. In 1648 Buxtorf published his Tractatus de punctorzur origine, antiquitate, et authoritate, oppositus Arcano punctationis revelato Ludovici Cappelli. He tried to prove by citations from the rabbinical writers, and by various arguments, that the points were at least as old as the time of Ezra, and thus possessed the authority of divine inspiration. Cappel replied in a second edition, which, however, was not pub lished until 1685. Buxtorf engaged in three other controversies with the same antagonist, on the subject of the integrity of the Massoretic text of the Old Testament, on the antiquity of the present Hebrew characters, and on the Lord's Supper.
Besides the works mentioned in this article, Buxtorf edited the great Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicunt, et Rabbinicum, on which his father had spent 20 years, and the great Hebrew Concordance.