The Text of the New Testament: From Manuscript to Modern Edition

by Jacob Harold Greenlee

The Text of the New Testament is a brief introduction for the lay person into the process whereby the New Testament came to be. It describes the basics of ancient writing tools, manuscripts, the work of scribes, and how to think about differences in what the various manuscripts say. This is a revised and expanded edition with a completely new chapter on how contemporary English translations fit in with our understanding of the New Testament text. Geared to the lay person who is uninformed or confused about textual criticism, Greenlee begins this volume by explaining the production of ancient manuscripts. He then traces the history of the development of the New Testament text. Readers are next introduced to the basic principles of textual criticism, the concept of variant readings, and how to determine which variant has the greatest likelihood of being the original reading. To illustrate the basic principles, several sample New Testament texts are examined. The book concludes by putting textual criticism in perspective as involving only a minute portion of the entire New Testament text, the bulk of which is indisputably attested by the manuscripts.

Genres: Theology

130 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2008

About the author

Jacob Harold Greenlee was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 12, 1918, the first child of Jacob Andrew and Ethel Edith Jarrett Greenlee. He graduated from Charleston High School in 1935.

Dr. Greenlee was an ordained United Methodist minister of the West Virginia Conference. He is the author with wife, Ruth, of a book about their ministry travels, and he has published 12 books dealing with the Greek language of the New Testament and more than 160 published articles. He is listed in more than twenty-five biographical volumes.

Reviews

[C.H. Cobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have read this book multiple times. It delivers on the promise of helping the reader understand textual criticism in an introductory way. Writing materials, formats of the documents (scrolls vs codices), important early manuscripts, the different kinds of witnesses to the manuscripts (lectionaries, etc), types of scribal errors, textual traditions, internal and external evidence, etc., are all covered in a very readable, understandable format.

Greenlee dispels numerous unhelpful charges (such as the text of the NT was intentionally corrupted, or that the KJV/NKJV is the only reliable translation, etc.) that are brought from outside and inside the church.

Well worth the read. You don't need to know Greek to understand this book. Five Stars!

[Todd Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really outstanding introduction to the subject of Textual Criticism of the Bible, specifically the New Testament. This is not a deep study of the subject. It is elementary enough for any layperson to understand. The fact is, most Christians today have no idea how the Bible came to us from the original writings. This book does a good job of explaining that as well as a good, basic explanation of how manuscripts of the New Testament are evaluated.

I highly recommend this book to any that have never studied this subject.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was not a long book to be the first book I read on my Nook HD, but I found it to be a very informative one concerning how the text of the New Testament was written, and how even now text analysis is used to determine if the most accurate text available is being used to compose our New Testament.

After assuring us that the New Testament is inspired literature, the author tells us how ancient writing material were made and used, and how texts were copied by hand up until the advent of the printing press. There are no original texts of the New Testament books (such as one of the letters of Paul) extant, so what we have are copies made from copies made from copies, quite nearly ad infinitum. Additionally, some families of texts can be identified (all of their copies came from a root copy), which roughly correspond to the centers of Christianity in the first millennium after Christ.

Faced with a multitude of handmade copies, all with minor (or major) copying mistakes (I am not perfect in doing my job, and it would be too much to expect a scribe or a monk in a scriptorium to be perfect), the author explains how variations in the texts can be judged as to which variant is the correct one using internal evidence within the texts in question and by using external evidence using other texts and other text families.

It is a fascinating account; and despite claims that no one can know just what the writers of the New Testament wrote down (due to minor and major mistakes in copying), except for a very few well-known sections (such as the several endings of the Gospel of Mark), there are no errors due to minor or major mistakes in copying that make a difference to our understanding of the New Testament.