The Greek-English New Testament: Tyndale House, Cambridge Edition and English Standard Version (Hardcover) (English and Ancient Greek Edition)

Arrived fast , very high quality cover and the translation is on point

Quality reference material

If you are only going to buy one Greek New Testament, this is not the one to buy. If you already have several other editions of the Greek New Testament and have read them through carefully, you may be curious to see the Tyndale House edition.For more than a century, the most accepted editions of the Greek New Testament have been those produced by a series of experts initially led by Eberhard Nestle, then by Erwin Nestle and subsequently by Kurt Aland and other leading specialists in the Greek text of the New Testament from a wide range of countries and Christian backgrounds. These editions are now known by the abbreviation Nestle-Aland, or NA, and the latest edition at the time of writing (May 2021) is the 28th, known as NA28. This is accepted by most experts world-wide and from all major Christian traditions as the most authoritative edition of the Greek text of the New Testament.Since 1966, the United Bible Societies (UBS) have also produced a text of the Greek New Testament. Since its third edition in 1975, the UBS Greek text has been the same as the Nestle-Aland text, with minor variations of punctuation and paragraphing. The latest UBS edition, first published in 2014, is the 5th, known as UBS5.Both of these editions are widely available, both as Greek text alone and in interlinear editions, “readers’ editions” (with vocabulary at the bottom of the page), in “critical editions” with comprehensive details of variants in manuscripts, and in editions in which the Greek text is printed alongside various well-known modern translations into English and into some other languages.For the person seeking the most authoritative New Testament Greek text, the NA28/UBS5 is the way to go.In its own version of the Greek New Testament, Tyndale House does not explain why they considered it necessary to produce a new edition of the Greek text, given the existence of NA28 and UBS5, the result of more than a century of work by the world’s leading specialists in the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament.It is also a puzzle why Tyndale House decided to base its edition on the Greek text by Tregelles (see p. 505). Although he is a highly-respected historical figure, his 19th-century edition of the Greek New Testament was produced prior to the great Greek New Testament manuscript discoveries of the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century.Jongkind and Williams of Tyndale House are of course also highly-respected academics in the 21st century, and they will no doubt have studied some of the Greek manuscripts discovered since the time of Tregelles, in order to produce their text.In fact there exists a high level of confidence in the Greek text of the New Testament and in consequence of this, the differences between the Tyndale House (hereafter, TH) text and the NA28/UBS5 text is on the whole small. Either text therefore gives a very close approximation to what must have been the original Greek text.So why do I advise against buying the TH text, if it is to be the only one that you will have, or your first Greek New Testament?In addition to their unusual choice of base text, the TH editors have made a number of strange decisions.Perhaps the most surprising is their refusal to write the name “Christ” with a capital letter, even where it is clearly used as a proper name for Jesus of Nazareth, as opposed to being a title or a description (“the anointed one”/”the Messiah”).They seek to justify this, but their argument fails to convince. They state that they base their decisions on the oldest manuscripts, but in fact the oldest manuscripts were written entirely in capital letters, so their decisions on capitalisation are entirely their own and the reasons for these decisions are not clear. Of course, if they were to follow completely the example of the oldest manuscripts, they would not print gaps between the words, one of many details that they decide not to follow, no doubt wisely.They do however state that they have reverted to the oldest spellings. However, Greek was routinely spoken and written on three different continents, over very many centuries, and Greek spelling was essentially phonetic, so spelling varied according to the century in which the text was written and according to the place. Thus there is no strong justification for the unusual spellings in the TH edition, including for relatively frequently-used names such as “David”. (On rare occasions, TH uses the standard spelling for this name, but one wonders if that is an oversight.)They have also been inconsistent in their application of other deviations from generally-accepted spellings and they themselves recognise this, referring, for instance to “choosing a particular spelling for a block of text” (p. 516).If an electronic version of TH becomes available, readers searching for particular words may fail to find them or may obtain incomplete and misleading results in consequence. The editors do themselves draw attention (p. 509) to some of these inconsistencies, but that will be of scant help to those studying the text, or to those who consult standard dictionaries of New Testament Greek for help with the meanings of TH words, some of which are unlikely to appear at all, in such spellings, in standard dictionaries. This could put readers in the early stages of their study of the language at a serious disadvantage in trying to understand the TH Greek text.The editors also refer to other spelling inconsistencies. For instance, they say, “In a number of lexemes our spelling in Luke has been different from that of Acts” (p. 510). When ancient copies of the whole New Testament were produced at one time and in one place, various different “scribes” or copyists were used for different books, and this could result in insignificant spelling variations between books. One wonders if this has led the TH editors astray.If a transcription of a particular manuscript is made, that transcription must reflect the spellings in that manuscript exactly, but in a printed edition of the whole New Testament based on studies of a range of manuscripts (hopefully, a wide range of manuscripts!), what the reader needs is the words that occur, consistently spelled in conformity with criteria that have been applied to the whole of the New Testament. The words must be the right words, but trying to reproduce the spelling quirks of different scribes is pointless and just presents the reader with further obstacles to overcome.The frequent omission in TH of a final letter “n” seems to fail to recognise that in many of the oldest manuscripts, in this position the letter “n” was frequently represented by a raised horizontal line, especially at the ends of lines of text or if space was limited in a longer line of text. As such, the “n” was not “omitted”, but merely represented in a different form that was designed to save space. Following this in a modern edition of the text seems misguided, especially as the raised horizontal line is not included.In contrast to this decision, the editors of TH have decided not to reproduce the nomina sacra, in which certain key words were reproduced in an abbreviated form on most (or even, all) occasions, in most manuscripts. This practice included the words “God”, “Father”, “Lord”, “Jesus”, “Christ”, “Son” and “Spirit”, along with various other words, depending on the manuscript, even though the editors of TH recognise that “for some words, nomina sacra are almost universal.” (p. 511). However, in the TH New Testament, all these words have been written out in full. The reasons for this are quite understandable, but the decision here does raise the question why the editors took the opposite decision with a final “n”.The editors state, “our aim has been to produce a text with a high degree of directly verified antiquity so that readers of this edition will have the benefit of knowing that any reading printed in this text rests on early testimony.” (p. 507) Their decision concerning nomina sacra seems to go completely against this principle, and one cannot avoid thinking that there was some confused decision-taking here, perhaps because the editors had adopted a series of contradictory criteria.Incredibly, in the light of this decision by the TH editors, instead of spelling out the corresponding words, they have chosen to write the number 666 in Revelation 13:18 by using the symbols of the ancient Greek numbering system, which uses a now defunct letter from the Classical Greek alphabet. Inevitably, virtually none of the readers in their main target audience will understand these symbols, know their numerical values, or know how to pronounce them. A footnote spells out the words, although without including the breathings or accents. The number symbol form, if deemed necessary, would be better in a footnote in a future edition, with the number spelled out in the text, as has been done with all other numbers in the TH New Testament (except one, see below), even though they are in fact normally written in number symbol form in most manuscripts.The TH editors have likewise used Greek numbering symbols for 144 in Revelation 21:17, again giving the words in a footnote but without accents or breathings. This is in contrast with their practice in Revelation 7:4, where they write out the same number (of thousands) in words in full, as well as all other numbers throughout the New Testament. This strange lack of consistency is to be regretted.Perhaps some of these unusual decisions will be explained more fully in the “textual commentary to be published subsequent [sic] to this edition.” (p. 506)The editors have also sometimes taken unusual decisions as regards breathing marks and accents, and while the earliest manuscripts had neither of these features, in modern editions of the Greek Bible from other sources there is consensus on the use of breathing marks and accents. The reasons for some of the decisions by Jongkind and Williams are hard to discern, being based neither on the earliest manuscripts nor on more recent practice, but on an intermediate stage somewhere. This may sound a rather esoteric detail, but it does affect frequently-used names such as Abraham and Jerusalem.For “Abraham”, they say (p. 513) “we chose a rough breathing [which indicates an initial “h” sound] on [Habraám] … but this should not be taken as an indication that the editors are completely confident that this is the earliest attested breathing … nor that this word was necessarily ever pronounced with aspiration … based on our limited understanding of current evidence.” Their decision thus sounds very strange and it may be that they will revise it in a subsequent edition. It is certainly to be hoped so.They also state that their policy on breathings and accents has included “refusing what occurs in manuscripts principally when it conflicts with the lettering we have selected.” (p. 513). This sounds like a very strange basis for their decision-making.On their use of accents, the authors state, “We have not … felt it either necessary or possible to follow witnesses [i.e., manuscripts] in every detail, and we cannot be sure that we have selected the best manuscripts to consider. We freely admit that our choice of manuscripts has been influenced by which images were easiest to access online.” (pp. 513-514) As regards their accenting of Semitic names, they concede, “In doing so, we are not necessarily maintaining that the first readers of the gospel accented the words thus.” (p. 514) One must admire the humility and honesty of the editors, while wondering why some of their decisions depart so far from norms that are accepted in other published editions of the Greek New Testament.The editors have chosen to mark the beginnings of paragraphs with ekthesis, in which the first letter or letters of the paragraph are moved left into the margin, instead of being indented as is now common. The earliest examples of ekthesis of which I am aware are in Codex Alexandrinus, which has been dated at approximately 420 AD and in which the ekthesis consists of just the initial letter of the word, written much, much larger than the rest of the text. The many, much earlier, manuscripts, do not display ekthesis, so too much should not be read into this practice. It is, however, a pleasant style that looks good in the Tyndale House New Testament, even if it is not based on the earliest manuscripts.Most modern editions of the Greek New Testament indicate quotations from the Old Testament, generally printing them in italics, and many editions give the Old Testament reference at the foot of the page, sometimes also indicating if the quotation has been taken from the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament or if it has been freshly translated from the Hebrew or Aramaic original by the writer of the New Testament text. The TH editors have decided to exclude all such helps from their text. The example given by the oldest manuscripts varies: most do not indicate Old Testament references, whereas Codex Alexandrinus (which had inspired the TH adoption of ekthesis) does indicate in the left-hand margin when there are quotations from the Jewish Scriptures, obviously not giving references as chapter and verse decisions were not yet in place (although the Psalms were numbered – see Acts 13:33).The order in which the editors have chosen to present the books of the New Testament is also strange, and users are likely to have difficulty finding quickly the texts that they wish to consult. The fact of the matter is that most of the earliest manuscripts of New Testament books do not contain the whole of the New Testament and so cannot provide guidance on the order of the books. Furthermore, the two oldest manuscripts of all the books of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus, have different orders for the books. There thus does not seem to be a strong argument for the TH editors to choose an order that corresponds to neither of these and also does not correspond to modern usage.In practice, no theologically-significant conclusions should be drawn from the order in which the books of the New Testament are presented in ancient manuscripts, and a common-sense approach would have been to have recognised and followed the order that has been used in most languages, including Greek editions of the New Testament, for more than 400 years, an order that is familiar to anyone who seeks to study the New Testament.The Tyndale House Greek New Testament is sometimes marketed as being somehow superior to other editions of the Greek text. This claim does not appear to be justified. The editors make a point of having aimed to be different from other editions of the Greek New Testament. Some of the changes that they have introduced are insignificant, some appear unwise or unjustified and some are just plain silly, such as putting their introduction to the text at the back of the book.The fact that this review has had to focus on relatively minor details does of course reveal the fundamental reliability of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, which enables readers, students of the text and Bible translators to have confidence in the Greek text of the New Testament, whether choosing NA28/UBS5 or TH.However, the five-star reviews that can be found for the TH edition seem to be inspired by the excitement of people who have never before held a Greek New Testament in their hands, know little Greek and have not yet read the TH edition.Such people may do better to “graduate” to the TH edition, after having read the whole of the Greek New Testament several times in an edition of NA28/UBS5 and after having studied the Greek text there, as the TH edition is not the best place to start such a journey. While this edition may be an interesting addition to a library of editions of the Greek New Testament, it is not a good starting point for people new to the Greek text of the New Testament. It is for the benefit of such people that, having read the TH edition carefully from cover to cover, I have written this review, and for their sakes that I have had to give this edition a low star rating, with regret.