George Ricker Berry

George Ricker Berry, D.D., Ph.D., (15 October 1865 24 May 1945) was an internationally known Semitic scholar and archaeologist, and Professor Emeritus of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament (the ''Englishman's Greek New Testament'' apparently created by Thomas Newberry), of which American editions are generally published with Berry's Lexicon and New Testament Synonyms, is a widely used Bible study aid.

Family

George Ricker Berry was born 15 October 1865 to William Drake Berry and Joanna Floyd Lawrence in West Sumner, Maine, USA. He was the sixth of ten children. Berry married Carrie Leola Clough (1877 4 March 1909), in Liberty, Waldo, Maine, on 17 August 1893. They had three children, Hilda Marion Berry (17 March 1895 April 1974), Miriam Clough (b. April 5, 1897), Lawrence Worthing (22 June 1903 30 July 1936). After Carrie died, he married Edith Van Wagner.George Ricker Berry at ancestry.com
/ref> Berry died on Thursday, 24 May 1945, in Cambridge, Massachusetts he was 79 years old.The Ottawa Journal Page 24, Friday, May 25, 1945
/ref>

Education

Berry received his A.B. degree from Colby College in 1885, and graduated from Newton Theological Institution in 1889. He was one of the first students to attend the University of Chicago when the new school opened in 1892, where he studied Semitic languages. After earning his Ph.D. in 1895, he was an instructor there for a year. In 1896 he was appointed Instructor of Semitic Languages at Colgate University. When Assyriologist Nathaniel Schmidt left Colgate and went to Cornell that year, Berry continued Schmidt's history course. He was promoted to Professor in 1897 and in the following years expanded the Assyriological offerings at Colgate. Berry was a member of Delta Upsilon fraternity.

Written works

* Book of Ruth in Encyclopedia Americana at WikiSource
*
* This interlinear Greek New Testament, which is still in print, actually involved almost no original work by Berry but simply combined in one volume three existing works by different editors/authors. The main body of the book reproduces ''The Englishman's Greek New Testament, giving the Greek text of Stephens 1550, with the various readings of the editions of Elzevir 1624, Griesbach 827 Lachmann 842 Tischendorf 859 Tregelles 872 Alford 863 and Wordsworth 860 together with an interlinear literal translation and the Authorised Version of 1611'' published in London by Bagster in 1877 without naming the author - who was later identified as Thomas Newberry (1811-1901). This, in turn, used the Greek text and the variants from the named editions from an early edition of F.H.A. Scrivener's edition of the Textus Receptus, first published by Cambridge in 1860 and repeatedly revised and republished afterward, and to this Berry added the brief Greek-English lexicon which is listed separately among his published works.
*
*

References

External links

7 articles by Berry
in International Standard Bible Encyclopedia

{{DEFAULTSORT:Berry, George Ricker
1865 births
1945 deaths
Colby College alumni
Translators of the Bible into English
University of Chicago alumni
Colgate University faculty