A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Edition

Preface to the First Edition

The present volume is designed to serve as a companion to the third edition of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament (UBS3), edited by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, and Allen Wikgren.

One of the chief purposes of the commentary is to set forth the reasons that led the Committee, or a majority of the members of the Committee, to adopt certain variant readings for inclusion in the text and to relegate certain other readings to the apparatus. On the basis of a record of the voting of the Committee, as well as, for most sessions, more or less full notes of the discussions that preceded the voting, the present writer has sought to frame and express concisely (a) the main problem or problems involved in each set of variants and (b) the Committee's evaluation and resolution of those problems. In writing the commentary it was necessary not only to review what the Committee had done, but also to consult once again the several commentaries, concordances, synopses, lexicons, grammars, and similar reference works that had been utilized by members of the Committee during their discussions. More than once the record of the discussion proved to be incomplete because, amid the lively exchange of opinions, the Committee had come to a decision without the formal enunciation of those reasons that appeared at the time to be obvious or self-evident. In such cases it was necessary for the present writer to supplement, or even to reconstruct, the tenor of the Committee's discussions.

The general Introduction to the commentary includes an outline of the chief kinds of considerations that the Committee took into account in choosing among variant readings. By becoming acquainted with these criteria (pp. 10*-14*) the reader will be able to understand more readily the presuppositions that underlie the Committee's evaluations of the divergent readings.

In addition to the 1440 sets of variant readings supplied in the apparatus of the Bible Societies' edition, the selection of which was made chiefly on the basis of their exegetical importance to the translator and student, the Committee suggested that certain other readings also deserved discussion in the supplementary volume. The author has therefore included comments on about 600 additional sets of variant readings, scattered throughout the New Testament; the majority of them, it will be noted, occur in the book of Acts, which, because of its peculiar textual problems, seemed to demand special attention (see the Introduction to the book of Acts).

In the comments on the variant readings for which the text-volume supplies an apparatus, it was considered sufficient to cite merely the more important manuscript witnesses; the reader of the commentary will be able to supplement the partial citation of evidence by consulting the fuller apparatus in the text-volume. On the other hand, occasionally the discussion in the commentary supplements the apparatus in the text-volume by the citation of additional witnesses, a few of which were not known at the time of the Committee's work, and others of which had been deemed unimportant for citation in the apparatus. Since the present volume is designed to assist translators and students who may not have available an extensive library, the comments on the 600 additional sets of variant readings are accompanied by a more or less full citation of evidence, drawn from such standard apparatus critici as those of Tischendorf, von Soden, Nestle, Merk, Bover, Souter, Hoskier (for Revelation), and Wordsworth and White, as well as from editions of individual manuscripts.

The writing of the commentary was begun during 1964, when the author, on sabbatical leave from his usual academic duties, was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. During the following years, as the first draft of each major section was completed, it was circulated among the other members of the Committee to make certain that the comments reflected adequately the Committee's deliberations. Frequently it had happened that the members of the Committee differed in their evaluation of the textual evidence, and thus many readings were adopted on the basis of a majority vote. In special cases, when a member holding a minority opinion had strong feelings that the majority had seriously gone astray, opportunity was given for him to express his own point of view. Such occasional comments, identified by the writer's initials and enclosed within square brackets, are appended to the main discussion of the textual problem in question.

Preface to the Second Edition

The present edition of this Textual Commentary has been adapted to the fourth revised edition of The Greek New Testament (UBS4), published by the German Bible Society on behalf of the United Bible Societies early in 1993. This means that each of the 284 additional sets of variant readings that were included by Committee decision in the apparatus of the fourth edition has now a corresponding entry in the Commentary. On the other hand, the comments on almost all of the 273 sets of variant readings that the Committee removed from the apparatus, because the variants were of less significance for translators and other readers, are no longer retained in the Commentary.

Other adjustments have also been made. For example, the implications of recent discussions concerning the so-called Caesarean text are reflected at various places in the Commentary. Further bibliographical items have been added here and there, particularly in connection with the expanded discussion of problems relating to the two main types of text in the book of Acts.

As was true in the earlier edition of the Commentary, textual discussions are usually supplied with the citation of only the more important manuscript witnesses. In some cases this information differs slightly from the citation given in the apparatus for those passages in the fourth edition of the Greek text. For example, certain later Greek uncial manuscripts as well as evidence from the Gothic version, which are no longer cited in the fourth edition of the text volume, continue to be cited here. On the other hand, additional minuscule manuscripts as well as evidence from the Old Church Slavonic version, which are now included in the apparatus of the fourth edition, are not repeated here. For a statement of the different principles followed in selecting witnesses to be cited in the third and the fourth editions, see the Introduction to each edition.