The Greek New Testament— Tyndale House edition

Last updated on: January 2, 2019 at 1:31 am by Ben Witherington

The Greek New Testament— Tyndale House edition 2018-11-28T10:34:10-05:00 Ben Witherington

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Crossway Publishers has very kindly sent me a copy of their new publication The Greek New Testament. Readers Edition. There is nothing to complain about when it comes to the quality of the production, the font size of the type, the copious vocabulary help at the bottom of the page, the glossary in the back, and the like. And I have to say that some of the changing of the paragraphing found in the Nestle-Aland or the UBS Greek NT is welcome, and helpful, but not in all cases (e.g. Heb. 12.1-2 belongs with the end of Heb. 11). No edition of the Greek NT can be all things to all people, but the absence of textual variants either in the margins or in the footnotes, and the absence of explanation for why various readings were chosen when it comes to text critical work will not please scholars who pick up this edition of the GNT.

One has to also ask— who exactly are the reader’s of this reader’s edition? Certainly not beginning Greek students who need as much help with grammar and syntax as with vocabulary. Further, the majority of pastors in the world today either know no Greek, or have very limited Greek, and are likely to find this GNT daunting, and requiring extra help to sort out. For the more experienced Greek student who at least knows the two major textual issues in the NT, namely whether the long ending of Mark is original (Mk. 16.9ff) and whether the woman caught in adultery is an original part of John’s Gospel (see John 7.53-8.11), they may be scratching their heads when they do not find the latter anywhere in the text of John, not even in the notes, but they do find the former…. again without explanation. The question again becomes the basis of the text critical decisions that led to this edition of the GNT.

Then there is the cultural issue of how can we actually attract interested millenials etc. to such a volume? There are no maps, no pictures, no visual aides in the volume, in short nothing to appeal to visual learners of the 21rst century. Indeed, the volume itself is jet black in cover, and stark black and white on the page (no red letter edition this). I realize a lot of careful work went into this GNT, and I am grateful as a scholar for whatever help I can get, especially when it comes to text critical issues of what the earliest form of the GNT actually said. But sadly, I cannot recommend this to pastors or young Greek students. Help with vocabulary is not good enough, since the word order of the Greek is not the same as in English, and the beginning student will be oblivious to issues involving purpose or result clauses, conditional sentences and the like.

I asked my doctoral students to evaluate this new GNT, and here is the assessment of one of them….

“Positives: the vocabulary helps were clear and easy to read; it looked like they gave multiple glosses and the root word or lexical form (I am not sure if the UBS and Zondervan reader’s do both, if they don’t, then that is something unique about this work); the verse numbers are nonintrusive, which makes the text read more like a book; probably the most significant positive is that this GNT (both the critical version and the readers) is significantly cheaper than the UBS and NA28 (but not the Zondervan Reader’s), so it may be useful to assign to students for that reason, especially because critical GNTs are expensive.

Negatives: the print is small and thin, and I find the UBS and NA28 much easier to read (it is much better than the Zondervan’s Greek text though); the introduction is incredibly brief and does not seem to mention anything about their text critical choices (granted, I am sure this discussion is present in their critical GNT that was released last year, but it should still be mentioned in this one as well; maybe it is mentioned and l missed it in my brief look).

Lastly, I really wonder why we need another GNT. Perhaps I need to read more about the critical Tyndale GNT from 2017 to ascertain why it is an important contribution. Nonetheless, I wonder whether this is just another book that is produced because publishers know people will buy it, and because publishers want their own critical edition so that they can use it in all their publications.”

Here’s another view, a bit more positive review, by my friend Bill Mounce….

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