The New Testament in the Original Greek
The New Testament in the Original Greek is a text edition of the New Testament in Greek published in 1881. The text is known after its editors Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828-1892) as Westcott and Hort .
It is a text-critical edition compiled from the oldest fragments of the New Testament and the texts discovered up to that point. The edition began in 1853, when the text editions by Karl Lachmann and Konstantin von Tischendorf , which existed at the time, proved insufficient for Westcott and Hort to give a clear idea of the readings and the correct biblical text. They agreed to work completely independently and only compare the preliminary results. Where they both came to the same conclusion, the text was adopted; where they had lasting differences, the other readings came into the apparatus as “alternative readings”. Both were members of the committee for the revision of the King James Bible for the publication of the Revised Version of 1881. The rough versions of the text obtained in this way were intensively discussed and agreed in the working groups before printing, and so this text became the main one, but not sole basis for the New Testament Revised Version.
The editors mostly favored the text of the Codex Sinaiticus and the text of the Codex Vaticanus , which is why they deviated in many places from the previous text editions, which in many cases were still based on the Textus receptus, which was already very outdated at that time . The so-called Western non-interpolations are particularly hot and debated to this day . If the Codex Bezae agrees with the old Syrian and the old Latin translations, they mean that the original text has been found (especially if it is shorter than the rest of the tradition). Overall, many readings of the so-called Western text were rightly eliminated as not original and the text structure was substantially modernized.
Westcott and Hort explain their motives: "We are of the opinion that among the numerous undoubtedly incorrect readings of the New Testament there are no indications of an intentional falsification of the text with dogmatic aims."
The edition formed the textual basis for numerous recent Bible translations and revisions at the beginning of the 20th century and is still the basis for some of today's Bible editions. In its role, the issue of Westcott and Hort was detached from the issues of the Nestle-Aland and the Greek New Testament of the United Bible Societies .
Individual evidence
- ^ BF Westcott, FJA Hort: The New Testament in the original Greek , Introduction Appendix, Macmillan, London 1896. p. 16.
- ↑ Original text: “… our belief that even among the numerous unquestionably spurious readings of the New Testament there are no signs of deliberate falsification of the text for dogmatic purposes.” , BF Westcott, FJA Hort: The New Testament in the original Greek , Introduction Appendix, Macmillan, London 1896. p. 282.
Web links
- The New Testament In The Original Greek American Edition 1882 with Engl. Translation and detailed foreword by Philip Schaff.
- introduction