An Introduction to the Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge

Dirk Jongkind

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781433564093
• eBook ISBN:
  9781433564123
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In 2017, Crossway and Cambridge University Press released  The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge—a groundbreaking edition of the Greek New Testament reflecting a decade of research. One of the principal scholars behind the project has now written this short book to provide crucial information about the Tyndale House edition in particular and the Greek New Testament in general, answering questions such as "What is a textual apparatus and why is one needed?" and "Is the New Testament reliable?" Dirk Jongkind gives guidance for understanding both the biblical text itself and this specific edition so that beginning Greek readers can have clarity and confidence as they engage with the New Testament in the original Greek.

1

Your Greek New Testament and the Manuscripts

All Bibles and translations have stories behind them. Some Bibles are beautifully produced; others give you the text on cheap paper and in tiny font. Likewise, translations make choices that are celebrated by some and scorned by others. And New Testaments in ancient Greek are tools prepared by scholars for all who want to read and study these Scriptures in their original language. This little book tells the story behind The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge (short title Tyndale House Edition, abbreviated as THGNT) and is a tool for all who have the privilege to learn New Testament Greek.

It is worth clarifying what this little book is not. It is not a grammar of New Testament Greek. There are many other grammars for beginning and intermediate Greek. Neither is this an exegetical guide or a “New Testament introduction.” There are also plenty of those. Some of the good Greek grammars and New Testament introductions devote space to where the text they study comes from. This is also what we do in this manual, but we do more. We look at Greek manuscripts and at how they transmitted the text. We explore errors in manuscripts and how to spot them. And we think about some of the answers others have given to the question, What should we print when publishing the Greek text of the New Testament? (and there have been a number of different answers to this question).

In the end, though, the main aim of this book is to help you read the Tyndale House Edition without any nagging and distracting questions about the text or the edition (or to answer these if you have them). I hope that after reading this introduction, when you pick up your Greek New Testament, you will do so with confidence and pleasure—even if you have only just started learning the language and barely recognize your first few words.

Translations and Editions

The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge is an edition of the text; it is not a translation. But what exactly is the difference between translations of the Greek, editions of the Greek, and “the original Greek”? Most people read the New Testament in a modern translation. These translations are based on a printed book that contains the Greek New Testament, which, of course, has been published since the invention of the printing press. Such a printed version of the Greek New Testament is an edition, because “the editor” has had to make all sorts of decisions on what text to print and how to print it. The goal of most editions is to give the original text as accurately as possible. The first such edition of the Greek New Testament ever printed and published was made in 1516 by a Dutch scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Spanish Complutensian Polyglot, which contains a Greek text of the New Testament, was printed earlier but published later.

Before the sixteenth century, the only way to reproduce a Greek New Testament was to copy all or part of it by hand. Consequently, early translations, made before the printing press, were translated from handwritten copies, or manuscripts. After the arrival of the printing press, modern translations were made from printed editions of the Greek, the first one being Luther’s German translation of the New Testament in 1522, based on Erasmus’s corrected, second edition of 1519 (see fig. 1.1). Over the centuries, various printed editions of the Greek New Testament have been made by using Greek manuscripts. At times, many manuscripts were used, while at other times, only a few (or even just one). There are also a surprising number of editions that are produced using only other editions, thus going back to the manuscripts only in an indirect way. The goal of the Tyndale House Edition, as is true of most editions, is to give the text of the original Greek as accurately as possible.

Figure 1.1 Manuscripts, editions, and translations1

Editions of the Greek New Testament include accents, spaces between words, and chapter and verse numbers. These come mainly from later Greek manuscripts or, in the case of chapter and verse numbers, from the sixteenth century. In order to ensure a text that is as free from typos as possible, the THGNT started off by digitizing a Greek New Testament published in the nineteenth century by Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. That text was then thoroughly compared to the earliest manuscripts and many later ones. The hundreds of changes that were made in this process have resulted in what the editors trust to be the most accurate edition of the Greek New Testament published so far. And an accurate edition lies at the heart of further accurate work in translation and in the study of the fine details of the text.

How Precisely Do We Know the Text?

For many readers of the New Testament, it is a disturbing moment when they are told that differences in the wording of the Greek text exist between the various handwritten copies of the text. A first response may be that, therefore, the New Testament itself cannot be reliable. After all, if the “original Greek” is in doubt, how can subsequent translations be reliable? How can we know that the text has not been edited in such a way that the original message was lost, or worse, suppressed? Sometimes this line of thinking is even developed into the thought that because there are differences between manuscripts, the words of the New Testament could not have been inspired.2 (Let me put my cards on the table. I stand in the Protestant tradition of historical Christianity and therefore hold to a belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible.)

Let us first have a look at the reliability argument. Is the text of the Greek New Testament unreliable because of differences between the manuscripts? One way to answer this question is to look at the important differences and the impact they make. Clearly, many of the differences affect how we read a particular sentence and how the text says what it says. But the actual content of a paragraph or a chapter—let alone that of a whole book—stands firm regardless. The message that is communicated comes across clearly even though there is interfering noise.

Take, for example, the opening phrase of Mark’s Gospel:

Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ υἱοῦ θεοῦ·

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.

In most of our translations, there is a footnote relating to the words “Son of God.” This is what the ESV has:

Some manuscripts omit the Son of God.

And this is what the same footnote looks like in the Tyndale House Edition:

Later we will learn about what all the various signs, letters, and numbers in these notes mean. All that is relevant now is that two manuscripts are listed that omit the phrase υἱοῦ θεοῦ, while there are also manuscripts that have υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ. On the surface, it makes a big difference whether the words “Son of God” are present. Does Mark immediately at the start of his Gospel declare that Jesus is the Son of God? Has someone tried to alter the message of the Gospel by removing these words? Taken on its own, the presence or absence of “Son of God” in the opening line makes a big difference. However, after the reader has arrived at Mark 1:11 (“And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’”), the issue has resolved itself completely. Jesus is presented as the Son early in Mark’s Gospel.

Another way of answering the reliability question is to look for signs of deliberate tampering with the text. People have claimed to have found these, but they have also had to admit that these are few and far between and do not occur on the scale and frequency that one might expect if there were an attempt to systematically change the text.3 The phenomenon that com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Newsletter Signup
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Analytical Outline
• Illustrations
• 1 Your Greek New Testament and the Manuscripts
• 2 Practicalities
• 3 Manuscripts
• 4 How Decisions Are Made
• 5 Why Not the Textus Receptus?
• 6 Why Not the Byzantine Text?
• 7 Biblical Theology and the Transmission of the Text
• 8 Where to Go from Here?
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• General Index
• Scripture Index