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J. K. Elliott, The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Edited by Michael W. Holmes., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 62, Issue 1, April 2011, Pages 288–294, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flr014
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Extract
A new hand edition of the Greek New Testament is welcome. The text of the Nestle and United Bible Society editions has been a cause for disquiet in several quarters for many years. The USA-based Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) decided that a freely available online version of a new critical edition of the Greek New Testament was a desideratum and in keeping with its ‘mission’ to promote biblical scholarship. Michael W. Holmes was appointed its editor and he has beavered away apparently clandestinely to produce this edition, which was launched during the annual meeting of SBL in November 2010. It is accessed on <http://sblgnt.com>. A printed version has been produced.
Holmes, for pragmatic reasons, worked with existing critical texts that are already accessible online and chose four that were not subject to copyright constraints. He started out with the classic Westcott and Hort edition from 1881 (hereafter WH); then he added Tregelles’s often overlooked edition from 1857–79, the Greek text underlying the evangelical New International Version (the first, not second, edition, of 2003, as edited by Goodrich and Lukaszewski), and Robinson and Pierpont’s The New Testament in the Original Greek Byzantine Textform (RP). Holmes doubtless found it easier to compare and collate these four because all are available electronically. He then analysed this amalgam especially in all the places where these editions disagree with each other and he then printed as this SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT) the text he preferred, having studied the manuscript attestations for all the readings. His apparatus gives us the support for that reading, with alternative readings among the base texts. (His method is not mechanical, as was the case with the early Nestle editions, where a majority reading from the editions of WH, Tischendorf, and Weymouth [later, B. Weiß] was printed.)
