Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament-FL-Comparison [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is a great Greek New Testament at a great price. Not only does this volume contain Westcott and Hort's groundbreaking Alexandrian text, the page-by-page comparison apparatus shows all differences between this Greek text, the Nestle-Aland text, and the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine text. So you're really getting three Greek texts in one. Bound into the back of this Greek NT is one of the most beloved small Greek lexicons of the modern era--Alexander Souter's Pocket Lexicon to the NT. Souter's definitions are clear, insightful, and extensive for a small resource. And this Souter has been upgraded with extra features not found in the original dictionary. The volume contains an excellent foreword by Eldon Jay Epp explaining the history of the Westcott-Hort text, and Westcott & Hort's own summary of their principles by which they arrived at the NT text they published. The binding is durable and high-quality.

Dr. Mark House

This Westcott and Hort (hereafter, W&H) critical edition of the Greek New Testament (by Hendrickson Publishers) is the best, or at least, one of the best texts out in the market right now. I say that for several reason. For starters, the text is easy to read. It's not like other Greek texts where the font is overly italicized and you have to squinch your eyes to see the words on the page or accent marks. To the contrary, the words are clear and easy to read.

The text includes a Foreword by Eldon Jay Epp where he gives a bit of a history lesson about the W&H text and of other texts that came before it. He goes over several interesting things such as the methodology that W&H employed, the use of the W&H text, and of other useful data. He concludes the Foreword with a bibliography "For Further Reading" (xviii), which is always a plus for those who like to dig deeper into these issues.

Now with the actual content and the way it is displayed, each book is given a header letting the reader know the major theme of any given section. Let's take the Epistle of James for example. Verse 1 is given the heading "Opening Greeting", letting the reader know that it is the opening greeting of the letter. Verses 2 through 8 are given the header "Endurance and Wisdom" because that's their main theme. The verses that follow, 9 through 11, are headed as "Poverty and Riches. And lastly, verses 12 through 18 are given the heading "Testing and Temptation." The usefulness of the headers is apparent when doing exegesis, since it gives us a `staring point' so to speak, in that it gives us the theme right away. So, that's a nice feature.

But easily the best feature is the critical apparatus. The apparatus lists all the variants between the Nestle-Aland 27th edition (hereafter, NA27) and the Robinson-Pierpoint Byzantine Textform (hereafter, RP). So what we have in this one book is actually three critical additions. We have all three critical editions because (1) the main text is the W&H, (2) the apparatus lists where the W&H and NA27 deviate, thus plugging in the `deviations' gives us the NA27 text, and (3) doing the same thing with the RP Byzantine Textform gives us the Byzantine text. 3 in 1!

Another aspect of this publication is the useful dictionary in the back of the book. It is a "revised and expanded" edition of the "A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament by Alexander Souter." This dictionary isn't just some cheap one word definition style lexicon, either. In many places it actually gives lengthy definitions on a given word itself or when attached to a preposition. For example the combination "'' ''''''" carries the notion "of mystic indwelling", says the dictionary. So, many of the entries are substantially not just there to fill up space.

Two final things to note are that this particular Hendrickson edition of W&H's text has an appendix titled "A Brief Explanation of the Principles of Textual Criticism" by W&H and a few black and white maps which may or may not be useful to some. Overall, it's a great publication and good text of the Greek New Testament.

I recommend this book to students and teachers of Classical and Biblical Greek. This edition of the Greek New Testament has a great hardback cover and binding. And, more importantly, the contents of the book is worth the purchase. I was told that the editors consulted Codex Vaticanus often for this book.