The author provides background information on how and why decisions were made to use certain words over others. In addition, the editors rejected the use of the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine Text, also known as the Majority Text, as their source text because those texts were from later time periods. I was quite surprised by this as I thought that most Bible translations used one or the other as their source text. Tyndale House used a Greek New Testament text from Samuel Prideaux Tregelles. Tregelles lived in the 1800s and produced his own Greek New Testament that was based on ancient manuscripts. The author also discussed the differences between a translation, an edition and an original. A section on how to spot an error in a manuscript was interesting as well as another section discussing decisions on what to print.
I do not read Greek. What will I remember most from this book? Probably that the early church scribes used what is now called nomina sacra to abbreviate the words for God, Jesus, Christ and Lord. The scribes would only write the first and last letters of those words and write a line over the top of them to connect the letters. Some of the early manuscripts that were analyzed to produce this new edition of the Greek New Testament had nomina sacra writings on them. These contracted words are still seen in Greek icons today.
This was a great book introducing a new edition of a Bible. I wish all translation committees would publish a book like this one so readers would know how decisions were made on what to include and what to exclude.
5 out of 5 stars.
No comments:
Post a Comment