William Gunion Rutherford (17 July 1853 – 19 July 1907) was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 scholar.

Life

He was born in Peeblesshire

Peeblesshire

Peeblesshire , the County of Peebles or Tweeddale was a county of Scotland. Its main town was Peebles, and it bordered Midlothian to the north, Selkirkshire to the east, Dumfriesshire to the south, and Lanarkshire to the west.After the local government reorganisation of 1975 the use of the name...

 on 17 July 1853 and educated at St Andrews

University of St Andrews

The University of St Andrews, informally referred to as "St Andrews", is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking world after Oxford and Cambridge. The university is situated in the town of St Andrews, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It was founded between...

 and Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College, Oxford

Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....

, where he graduated in natural science. His intention to enter medical profession was abandoned in favour of a scholastic career. From 1883 to 1901 he was Head Master of Westminster School

Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...

; and his death deprived classical scholarship in the UK of one of its most brilliant modern representatives. He was also a Fellow of University College, Oxford

University College, Oxford

.University College , is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2009 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £110m...

 for a time.

Work

Rutherford devoted special attention to Attic Greek

Attic Greek

Attic Greek is the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica, which includes Athens. Of the ancient dialects, it is the most similar to later Greek, and is the standard form of the language studied in courses of "Ancient Greek". It is sometimes included in Ionic.- Origin and range...

 idioms and the language of Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete...

. His most important work, New Phrynichus (1882), dealing with the Atticism

Atticism

Atticism was a rhetorical movement that began in the first quarter of the 1st century BC; it may also refer to the wordings and phrasings typical of this movement, in contrast with spoken Greek, which continued to evolve in directions guided by the common usages of Hellenistic Greek.Atticism was...

s of Phrynichus Arabius

Phrynichus Arabius

Phrynichus Arabius or Phrynichus of Bithynia was a Greek grammarian who flourished in 2nd century Bithynia, writing works on proper Attic usage...

, was supplemented by his Babrius

Babrius

Babrius was the author of a collection of fables written in Greek. He collected many of the fables that are known to us today simply as Aesop's fables .Practically nothing is known of him...

(1883), a specimen of the later Greek language

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, which was the chief subject of Christian August Lobeck's earlier commentary (1820) on Phrynichus. His edition (1896-1905) of the Aristophanic scholia from the Ravenna manuscript was less successful. Mention may also be made of his Elementary Greek Accidence and Lex Rex, a list of cognate words in Greek, Latin and English.

In the year 1900, Rutherford produced an English translation of some parts of the Bible, called "Five Pauline Epistles - A New Translation

Five Pauline Epistles, A New Translation

The Five Pauline Epistles, A New Translation is a partial Bible translation produced by Scottish scholar William Gunion Rutherford, of five books of the New Testament. The Bible books that were translated into English by Rutherford are a number of Pauline Epistles or "didactic letters", believed...

." This work was a translation of the books of Romans, first and second Thessalonians, and first and second Corinthians, with a brief analysis.

William G. Rutherford died on 19 July 1907, two days after his 54th birthday.