From F. F. Bruce's 'In Retrospect': “One ministering brother to whom I frequently listened with appreciation—though not always with agreement—was John Brown (1846–1938), who spent the last thirty-odd years of his life in Edinburgh, but had lived for forty years before that in Greenock, in the west of Scotland. In his prime he had been one of the leaders of the Needed Truth secession in Scotland (1892)—‘we expected’, he once remarked, ‘to carry the whole of Scotland’—but later he returned to the fellowship of the churches which he had left. Some other brethren who did the same reacted vigorously against the Needed Truth position and became more ‘open’ than they had been before (I think, for example, of L. W. G. Alexander), but John Brown retained many Needed Truth principles, restricting the designation ‘church of God’, for instance, to a local company of Christians canonically ‘gathered together into the name of the Lord.’ By calling John Brown was a master baker, but had taught himself a little Greek and rather less Hebrew. He was wholeheartedly devoted to the Revised New Testament of 1881 and its underlying text, declaring that ‘where Lachmann, Tregelles, Tischendorf, and Westcott and Hort agree, you have verily what the Spirit saith’, and that ‘it is impossible to know the mind of God if you depend on the Authorized Version’. ‘Will any one tell me’, he would challenge us from the platform, ‘that the last twelve verses of Mark’s Gospel are the Word of God?’ No one, naturally, would have dared to tell him any such thing.”
