Horatio Balch Hackett

Who was Horatio Balch Hackett?

Horatio Balch Hackett, American biblical scholar, was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts.

He was educated at Phillips Academy and at Amherst College, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1830, and at Andover Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1834. He was adjunct professor of Latin and Greek Languages and Literature at Brown University in 1835-1838 and professor of Hebrew Literature there in 1838-1839.

He was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1839—he had become a Baptist at Andover as the result of preparing a paper on baptism in the New Testament and the Fathers—and in 1839-1868 he was professor of Biblical literature and interpretation in Newton Theological Institution where his most important work was the introduction of the modern German methods of Biblical criticism, which he had learned from Moses Stuart at Andover and with which he made himself more familiar in Germany in 1841.

He travelled in Egypt and Palestine in 1852, and in 1858-1859 in Greece, becoming proficient in modern Greek. From 1870 until his death in Rochester, New York, he was professor of Biblical literature and New Testament exegesis in the Rochester Theological Seminary. He was a great teacher but a greater critical and exegetical scholar.