Saturday, April 5, 2008

New Testament Greek Manuscripts Series

One of the comments put me onto a Tyndale House Publishers series, called the New Testament Greek Manuscripts. When I went to Tyndale House website, I found that they no longer own them, but sent me to a mission website where they can be purchased. They are book-by-book complete manuscript traditions of all verses, I think. But, there are not volumes for every book of the NT. Since Tyndale no longer owns the series, I wonder if this means that there will be no more volumes. Does anyone know?

Here is the LINK.

4 comments:

Stephen C. Carlson said...

Reuben Swanson, who has been doing the series, has retired and passed on his materials to Kent Clarke of Trinity Western University. I don't the know the current statues of the project, but it is reasonable to expect some delay during the transfer.

MSH said...

The current status is that Kent expects it to take 4-5 years to complete Swanson's work. I spoke to Kent about it around a year ago. He's in my neck of the woods.

chuck grantham said...

From Reuben Swanson's Introduction to "New Testament Greek Manuscripts":

"Completeness is not to be understood in the sense of a complete reporting of all manuscripts, versions, lectionaries, and church fathers, but rather the complete reporting of every variant from those particular sources used in this work. There is no edition that is complete in the former sense, or in the latter sense, for that matter."

Way too many manuscripts to be crammed into any one book. The hope of an electronic critical edition is, I presume, to be much more complete than a printed edition, but even then it is a HUGE amount of work.

It would be nice if someone were to follow Swanson's lead with the other languages. That would make a good bookcase.

I think it important to remember that UBS and NA are handbooks, not complete guides. One doesn't expect any single commentary to cover everything about a biblical book, so why would one expect it of textual guides?

April DeConick said...

Thanks for this information!