THGNT Bundle with Apparatus

PREFACE

The books that constitute the Greek New Testament have a rich body of evidence behind them. Parts of these texts are attested in Greek manuscripts from as early as the second century AD, and significant witnesses come from every century thereafter until the sixteenth century, when printing had substantially displaced manuscripts as the way to transmit the biblical text.
This edition, based on a thorough revision of the great nineteenth- century edition of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, aims to present the New Testament books in the earliest form in which they are well attested. To do this it uses careful analysis of the scribal habits and typical transmission errors of individual manuscripts to establish which readings are likely to be prior.
For the sake of readability, we have differed from early manuscripts by using spaces between words, generally writing in lower case, and admitting verse numbers. To avoid excessive interpretative work on behalf of readers we have shown restraint in use of paragraphing and capitalization, and have restricted punctuation marks to comma, high point, full stop, and question mark. The text is also uninterrupted by signs used in other editions to mark the presence of variants. In addition we have paid special attention to spelling, since New Testament manuscripts from the fifth century or earlier often contain orthography that differs from that of Classical writers, mediaeval manuscripts, and most modern editions.
Manuscripts typically preserve books of the New Testament in four groups: the Four Gospels; Acts and the Catholic Epistles; the Pauline Epistles traditionally including Hebrews; and the Apocalypse. Though few manuscripts contain all of these, the order with Acts and the Catholic Epistles preceding the Pauline corpus predominates and is therefore reflected in this edition.
At the foot of the page is an apparatus showing variations from the text printed. This begins with the wording from the main text and the list of manuscripts which support it. Variant wordings are then given, followed by the manuscripts that support them. A detailed description of how to use this edition is given in the Introduction to This Edition of the Greek New Testament, in the back of this volume, pages 505–523. (In the Bible View Information of theWord)
The focus of these sacred scriptures is, of course, on the person of Jesus Christ, presented on page after page as the unique Son of God. No other documents share such a close relationship to him, and this alone is enough reason to encourage all who have the capability and opportunity to devote themselves to the serious study of the New Testament in Greek.

Soli Deo Gloria
Dirk Jongkind and Peter J. Williams
Tyndale House, Cambridge, Easter 2017

INTRODUCTION
TO THIS EDITION OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT
This edition aims to present in an easily readable format the best approximation to the words written by the New Testament authors, within the constraints of the documentary evidence that survives. This means that the editors have sought to present the authors’ composition itself, with the proviso that in seeking to reach this goal we will not depart from what is contained in at least some Greek witnesses. We are naturally aware that our earliest extensive New Testament manuscripts usually provide us with New Testament books in a compiled form, and thus features such as the orders or titles of books or the running headers are plausibly judged to postdate the first composition of the New Testament books themselves. Nevertheless, we have not felt it our job as editors to go back behind the witnesses that survive. Rather, in this edition we seek to constrain editorial choice to what is found in Greek manuscripts, not only in these matters, but also in other ones such as paragraph divisions, spelling, breathings, and accents. The purpose of such constraint is both as a check on editorial fallibility and eccentricity and also as a means of commending the resultant text to readers.
This edition began as a revision of the New Testament text of Samuel Prideaux Tregelles (1813–1875), which was used by Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort in the preparation of their own influential edition (1881). Westcott and Hort’s text in turn influenced the editions of the Nestle (later Nestle-Aland) tradition. However, other than through this indirect influence, Tregelles’s edition has been undeservedly ignored, unlike those of Tregelles’s contemporary Constantin von Tischendorf (1815–1874). It was partly to compensate for this oversight that we originally used Tregelles’s text as our base, but more particularly because of Tregelles’s strong reliance on the testimony of documents and on the principle of proven antiquity. Since his time many early witnesses, especially on papyrus, have come to light. These in turn have allowed analyses of early scribal habits, which would not have been as possible in Tregelles’s day.
Our revision of Tregelles has ended up being more thoroughgoing than we had expected, such that this is now a completely new edition, rather than a light revision. In keeping with Tregelles’s documentary approach we have sought to reduce the likelihood that any reading adopted is a mere scribal aberration by insisting that our text be attested in two or more Greek manuscripts, at least one being from the fifth century or earlier. We have relaxed this rule somewhat for the book of Revelation owing to its more limited range of early extensive witnesses. We will seek to give further transparency to our editorial reasoning in a textual commentary to be published subsequent to this edition.
In evaluating textual variations, priority was given to scribal tendencies that are well documented and to processes of unconscious change. Where a variant could reasonably be explained by one of many forms of documented scribal oversight, all other things being equal, no further explanation was sought.
Perhaps most prominent amongst these scribal tendencies is to allow influence from text elsewhere. Such text can be found in the immediate context of the variant (e.g., Matt. 1:6; 12:31), elsewhere in the same book (Acts 10:12; compare 11:6; Gal. 3:1; compare 5:7), or in different books altogether (Gal. 4:7; compare Rom. 8:17). The lengthening of the text by harmonization is partly offset by the occasional omission of small words and non-essential phrases; at other times words are simply left out for no apparent reason. Another disturbance in the transmission process is the habit of copying the text in the form that requires least energy to retain. This means that the wording tends to gravitate towards that regarded as standard (unmarked and/or most frequent): connectives tend to be supplied when absent, referents are made explicit, and in narrative the tendency towards aorist verbs is stronger than that away from the aorist.
Such tendencies feature in all strands of the manuscript tradition, but not with equal frequency. Therefore the observation of general scribal habits needs to be informed by the study of the tendencies of individual manuscripts or groupings of related manuscripts. Thus, for example, in the Gospel of John, Codex Vaticanus, B(03), has a tendency to omit the article before the name Ἰησοῦς, strengthening the already existing phenomenon in the Gospel itself. Likewise, the same witness reinforces the preference for Christ Jesus over Jesus Christ in the Pauline corpus.
Other New Testament editions have a much fuller apparatus, but we believe that this edition’s chief significance, like that of Westcott and Hort, lies not in its apparatus but in the text itself. The limited apparatus is designed primarily to illustrate the decision- making process, which has focussed on Greek witnesses of the first millennium. We recognize, of course, that versional and patristic witnesses add significantly to our knowledge of the history of the transmission of the New Testament text. Nevertheless, we have not felt that at any point their witness was strong enough to change the decisions we made on the basis of the Greek manuscripts. We are also aware that our focus on early Greek manuscript testimony differs from recent trends shown in the editing of the Catholic Epistles in the Editio Critica Maior produced under the auspices of the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster. We acknowledge that at times a late manuscript may contain a text that is logically prior to and ancestral to that in the earliest extant manuscripts. However, our aim has been to produce a text with a high degree of directly verified antiquity so that users of this edition will have the benefit of knowing that any reading printed in this text rests on early testimony. Throughout the text, the editors sought to consider the most ancient Greek testimony wherever feasible. This has included seeking ancient testimony for several different features of the text, including paragraphing, spelling, breathings, and accents.

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