The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text with Apparatus: Second Edition Review

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The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text with Apparatus: Second Edition ReviewI own the second edition of this book, which is apparently currently out of print. I am hoping that a new edition is the works, and so thought I would give a review. This book is a real boon to New Testament scholarship. It is a revival of scholarly lines of thinking that have lost popularity in the last centuries. Since time immemorial, the method of finding out whether a particular Greek manuscript contained an accurate rendering of the originals written by the apostles and their associates was to compare it against the majority of available Greek manuscripts (called 'witnesses' because they testify to what the original might have been). If you have a manuscript that said that Jesus walked on honey and a thousand others that said that he walked on water, then your manuscript is incorrect. The reason for this thinking is two-fold. First, on a mundane level, good quality manuscripts will tend to be used as sources for others, while bad quality manuscripts tend to get thrown by the wayside. The second, spiritual reasoning, is that God providentially preserves his written Word, so God will protect good manuscripts and cause them to be copied reliably. God will let the bad manuscripts fall into obscurity. So this was the thinking of the midieval and reformation scholars. This thinking also created the famous "Textus Receptus" which was used as a basis for the New Testament of the King James Version.
In the last century, European scholarship began to apply critical thinking to how manuscripts were transmitted and came up with some new ideas. They thought completely from a humanistic standpoint, that is, they didn't consider God's role in preservation of scripture at all. In addition, they gave weight to the idea that errors accumulate over time, and therefore older manuscripts are better than newer ones. That is, If you have a manuscript that says Jesus walked on honey, and a thousand others that say he walked on water, but the one that says he walked on honey is older, then it is probably correct, and the others are based on later manuscripts in to which errors have crept over time.
It just so happens that this is the state of New Testament textual criticism. We have thousands of newer manuscripts that tend to resemble each other and a few really old ones that are a little different, and tend to resemble each other.
The most popular Greek texts used by modern scholars are the Novum Testamentum Graece, which is based on the critical method, and the Textus Receptus, which is based on the majority method. Unfortunately, the Receptus is from the 16th century, and has a number of readings that are not majority readings because the compilers of the text had limited information available to them. So it came to pass that anyone 'scholarly' believed in the critical text, and only bumpkin preachers used the Receptus.
Lately, however, the theories used by the critical scholars have come under some serious fire. The critical text scholars proposed a theory for why all the later manuscripts have been 'corrupted', but this theory has never yielded any evidence that would prove it true. Also, some believe that the particular family of older manuscripts used by these scholars might have come from a heretical sect. Though this theory has also not yielded any evidence proving it true, enough doubt has been cast on the situation to warrant new respect for the majority of later texts. Maybe they really are better. So the book that I am reviewing was created as a modern update of the Textus Receptus based on the cutting edge of manuscript knowledge. It is not a perfect text, but it is a good one. I highly recommend that seminary students and Greek New Testament enthusiasts purchase it in addition to the critical text and the Textus Receptus.The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text with Apparatus: Second Edition Overview
The only complete edition of the Greek New Testament that shows what the majority of Greek manuscripts in existence contain.All students of biblical Greek should use this edition to consider its thoughtful challenge to the eclectic text provided in all other Greek Testaments


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