If the word of God is what we
say we believe it is then it is
worthy of our most rigorous
scholarship and efforts and care
and precision down to every last
detail.
And that conviction is what has
fueled Tyndale House and their
work over the last 10 plus years
in creating this new edition of
The Greek New Testament
ultimately for the sake of the
health of the people of God.
The text of the Greek New
Testament has suffered in some
ways in the course of
transmission.
What we are trying to do is to
understand textual variance by
means of scribal habits, which
is a sort of catch all term for
all the things scribes do wrong
when copying.
By the late 18th century people
had begun documenting very
typical mistakes that scribes
make but they were generalized
across a whole number of
manuscripts.
So they would say scribes
generally make these sorts of
mistakes.
What's happened in the second
half of the 20th century and
into the 21st is people have
started asking the question,
'can we say what mistakes
particular scribes make?'
There's been studies
particularly on the early papyri
and so it's really benefiting
from those and advancing those
studies further through studies
of our own that we've been able
to start looking at the
plausibility of how a mistake
might arise.
One of the things that happened
over centuries of copying is
that the New Testament became
smoother and some of the
individuality of the various
authors dissapears a little bit
because of this harmonization.
So when you're copying the
Gospel of Mark and you happen to
know the Gospel of Matthew by
heart you will start copying
Mark with all sorts of
influences from Matthew thrown
in.
So you'll get influence from
parallel passages and one of the
results of this sort of
harmonisation is that the text
picks up phrases from elsewhere
in the New Testament or
sometimes even the Old
Testament.
It's very strong between
Matthew, Mark and Luke, between
Ephesians and Colossians.
You get all sorts of influence
from one sentence to the other.
Now this process is never so
rigorous or so systematic that
the original is lost whatsoever.
But we tried to reverse that
process and go back to some of
its original roughness.
We've used the early papyri,
P45, P66, P75, and then we have,
of course, the early Majuscule
manuscripts, Sinaiticus,
Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Codex
Ephraemi Rescriptus, Codex
Bezae.
People might say, 'well don't
all Greek New Testament's use
the early manuscripts?' and the
answer is they do but we're
using them in a way which
ensures that any reading we
choose is actually something
that was widespread in
antiquity.
So we are using a rule of having
at least two early manuscripts
that agree on any point that we
adopt within our text and that
is different from other
additions of the Greek New
Testament.
In this edition you will come
across spellings which are
unusual, paragraph divisions
that are unusual, and sometimes
you also come across a
particular sequence of words
which you would not find in a
modern translation.
The differences are actually
quite small but if as a preacher
or as an exegete you need a text
that is as precise as possible a
text such as this Greek New
Testament will sometimes affect
how you explain a particular
verse.
There's a lot of work which has
to go behind each one of those
investigating manuscripts and I
think people will see that when
they read the edition, that a
lot of thought has gone into
each of these decisions.
Our addition is something that
ought to be on the desk of every
scholar.
We're not saying that they
shouldn't have other additions,
there are other good editions
out there.
But our edition will be historic
as a documentary edition.
That is we are saying that the
actual manuscripts should have a
huge say in everything from
paragraphing to spelling to
accents to the actual text.
All of old work doesn't change
the theology of The New
Testament but what it does do is
it seeks to fine tune our
perception of this most
important body of literature
that you can imagine.
We stand in a long line of
scholars and Christians and
church fathers who have a real
passion to get the tiniest
details of the Greek New
Testament right.
And I think that this Greek New
Testament has made a significant
step in getting even more of the
details right than we have
before.
We at Crossway are immensely
grateful for the opportunity to
come alongside Tyndale House in
the publishing of this Greek New
Testament including making it
available digitally freely to
anyone anywhere in the world.
Pete and Dirk have simply given
themselves to this project, now
over ten years, and the result
is a text that stands alongside
any other text that is available
today and the driving concern
all along has been the
preciousness of the very words
of God.
