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Introduction
Joey McCollum and Stephen L. Brown
About This Edition
The Solid Rock Greek New Testament: Scholar's Edition (SRS) was produced for the purpose of highlighting interactions between the various text-critical methodologies that underlie prominent Greek New Testament editions. In compiling this edition, we have expanded on the apparatus of the SBL Greek New Testament (SBL GNT) by collating several additional works at more than one thousand additional points of variation. This expansion was motivated by two goals: First, to add to the SBL GNT's coverage of Byzantine and majority texts, with the purpose of highlighting previously-overlooked points of heterogeneity in the bulk of later manuscripts; and second, to extend the SBL GNT's treatment of prominent critical texts like Nestle-Aland that have seen major changes in content and methodology in their most recent editions.
Strictly speaking, SRS is not a critical edition of the Greek New Testament. Since the sources we have collated are other editions rather than historical manuscripts, translations, and citations of the Greek text, SRS is better described as a digest of critical texts. As such, it is intended to be a study help to students, pastors, and other teachers of the Word who desire a simple, but comprehensive guide to the places where text-critical scholarship offers differing opinions. Exegesis begins with the text; therefore, a solid foundation for making decisions on variants in the text is indispensable.
The Text
The SRS edition has been produced on Byzantine-priority grounds,*While the editors differ in their degrees of support for this approach, both acknowledge that it is one worthy of closer consideration than it has so far received. An introduction to and defense of Byzantine-priority can be found in the first essay of the appendix. using an electronic version of the Robinson-Pierpont (RP) text as a base. A commentary on all of the textual differences between this edition and RP can be found in the second essay of the appendix.
Paratextual matters, such as verse and paragraph divisions, capitalization, and punctuation generally follow the conventions of RP, though some changes have been made.†A log of these changes can be found at https://github.com/jjmccollum/solid-rock-gnt. Abbreviations for numbers and nomina sacra, common in Greek manuscripts, have been expanded for ease of reading. The typeface used in this edition prints iota adscripts, rather than subscripts, with capital letters, so, for example, ῼ should be read as the capitalized equivalent of ῳ. For the sake of convenience, we have placed the New Testament books in the order most familiar to English-speaking Christians.
The Apparatus
Our collation covers the following editions of the Greek New Testament:
RP Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, eds. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform. Southborough, MA: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005. Electronic version. This is the quintessential Byzantine-priority critical text. It follows the predominant Kx Byzantine textual family in most of the New Testament and the Koine or Q profile in Revelation. Differences between the print and electronic versions are summarized at the beginning of the second appendix essay.
f 35 Wilbur N. Pickering, ed. The Greek New Testament According to Family 35. 2nd ed. Wilbur N. Pickering, 2015. This edition follows the consensus of Kr, or Family 35. This textual family has fewer and later witnesses than Kx , but it has a more cohesive and consistent profile throughout the New Testament.
TR The Textus Receptus—specifically, the third or “Stephanus” edition produced in 1550. The Textus Receptus was one of the earliest critical editions of the New Testament. While the principles used to produce it might be considered closer to eclecticism than to Byzantine-priority, the few manuscripts collated for the edition were generally Byzantine in character, making the text largely Byzantine.
TNT2 The 2009 Tyndale House corrected edition of Samuel P. Tregelles, ed. The Greek New Testament, Edited from Ancient Authorities, with their Various Readings in Full, and the Latin Version of Jerome. London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1857–1879. Tregelles's Greek New Testament both preceded and influenced that of Westcott and Hort. His methodology, like theirs, placed great emphasis on knowledge of manuscript evidence. Yet unlike Westcott and Hort, who in practice ruled out much of this evidence through a conjectured history of the text, Tregelles eschewed purely conjectural approaches and relied much more on the manuscript data itself. As a result, where the Westcott-Hort edition follows more of a copy-text methodology, Tregelles's text takes a more balanced approach.
WH Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort. The New Testament in the Original Greek. Vol. 1: Text. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1881. This edition served as a critical response to the Textus Receptus, and its publication marked a turning point for mainstream New Testament textual criticism. The methodology of Westcott and Hort made use of internal canons of evaluating readings, but it emphasized the priority of external evidence, or knowledge of manuscripts and their relative weights. Because Westcott and Hort assigned the highest weight to the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus ( 01 / א ) and Vaticanus (B / 03), their text most closely resembles that of these two witnesses, and especially that of Vaticanus.
NA25 Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland, eds. Novum Testamentum Graece cum apparatu critico curavit Eberhard Nestle novis curis elaboravit Erwin Nestle. 25th ed. Stuttgart: Privilegierte Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1963. This was the last edition of the Nestle text to be produced under Erwin Nestle's supervision. It follows the simple methodology of adopting the majority reading of three other prominent editions, namely, those of Westcott-Hort, Tischendorf, and Weiss.
NA27 Kurt Aland et al., eds. Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. 27th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993. Kurt Aland began supervising the production of the Nestle-Aland text with the twenty-sixth edition. The text of that edition (and this one, since only the textual apparatus was changed in the twenty-seventh edition) matches that of the third edition of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament (UBS3). The underlying methodology is an eclectic one, with variants evaluated more-or-less independently according to internal canons and the weight of manuscript evidence. Since the editors assigned a higher weight to early Alexandrian witnesses, the resulting text is still close to Westcott-Hort, but not as close as NA25 was.
NA28 Barbara Aland et al., eds. Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. 28th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012. The text of this edition differs from that of NA27 primarily in the catholic epistles, where the text has been updated according to the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method (CBGM). Everywhere else, the only changes introduced to the text are orthographic (see p. xii for more detail).
NIV73 Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski. A Reader's Greek New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003. This edition contains the Greek text underlying the 1973 New International Version and is the work of the Committee on Bible Translation. It corresponds closely to NA27, being constructed according to a similar eclectic methodology and differing from its text in fewer than 300 places.
NIV11 Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski. A Reader's Greek New Testament. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015. This edition contains the Greek text behind the 2011 New International Version and, like the 2003 edition, is the work of the Committee on Bible Translation. This edition accounts for the more recent changes introduced in NA28 and disagrees with that text in nearly 600 locations.
SBL Michael W. Holmes, ed. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010. As noted before, this edition provides a basis of comparison for several prominent critical editions of the Greek New Testament. It uses Westcott-Hort as its base text and departs from that text according to standard eclectic principles.
In the apparatus, each verse containing variation units is listed before the details of the variation units. If multiple variation units of the same type occur in a verse, then the subsequent markers are distinguished with numbers. The first reading listed is always the SRS reading; therefore, the SRS siglum is omitted except where no other cited edition shares its reading.‡This occurs 11 times in Jn 7:53-8:11 and once in 1 Jn 5:4. SRS adopts a spelling not adopted by other cited editions in 2 Cor 11:4, but this orthographic variant is not printed in the apparatus. All of these differences are covered in more detail in the second appendix essay. If all cited NA or NIV editions agree at a variant, then they are simply combined under the NA or NIV siglum, respectively; otherwise, they will be represented by distinguishable sigla like NA25 and NA27+28.
Throughout the essays in the appendix, the following abbreviations for common terms are used: NT for New Testament, MS for manuscript, MSS for manuscripts, and LXX for the Septuagint.
Acknowledgments
We owe special thanks to Maurice A. Robinson, whose extensive text-critical efforts with William G. Pierpont and commitment to making God's word freely accessible have provided the basic text of this edition, and whose comments on collation details and divided Byzantine readings were indispensible in the preparation of this text. We also wish to recognize Michael W. Holmes, whose exemplary work on the SBL GNT and encouraging responses to our ideas gave us the confidence to undertake the project that culminated in this edition; we hope that our extension to his collation work will be an honor to him and his efforts. We extend our gratitude to Paul D. Anderson of the CSPMT for his helpful feedback during the early stages of this edition's development.
To God be the glory!
January 2018