GreekNewTestament.Net (Internet Edition With Critical Apparatus) is collated, edited and translated into English by Daniel Yen. Unlike printed critical editions of the Greek New Testament, Greek New Testament Dot Net aims to present the readings of all extant manuscripts of the New Testament in parallel.
The Original Manuscripts of the New Testament
We do not have the original manuscripts of the New Testament. What we have today are copies of the copies of the copies of the autographs. Why?
Συντετέλεσται δῆτα καθ᾿ ἡμᾶς ἅπαντα, ὁπηνίκα τῶν μὲν προσευκτηρίων τοὺς οἴκους ἐξ ὕψους εἰς ἔδαφος αὐτοῖς θεμελίοις καταρριπτουμένους, τὰς δ᾿ ἐνθέους καὶ ἱερὰς γραφὰς κατὰ μέσας ἀγορὰς πυρὶ παραδιδομένας αὐτοῖς ἐπείδομεν ὀφθαλμοῖς τούς τε τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν ποιμένας αἰσχρῶς ὧδε κἀκεῖσε κρυπταζομένους, τοὺς δὲ ἀσχημόνως ἁλισκομένους καὶ πρὸς τῶν ἐχθρῶν καταπαιζομένους,
All these things were fulfilled in us, when we saw with our own eyes the houses of prayer thrown down to the very foundations, and the Divine and Sacred Scriptures committed to the flames in the midst of the market-places, and the shepherds of the churches basely hidden here and there, and some of them captured ignominiously, and mocked by their enemies. (Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, Book 8, Chapter 2)
We have as many as eighteen second-century manuscripts of the New Testament, sixty-four from the third, and forty-eight from the fourth. Papyrus P52, the earliest extant record of a canonical New Testament text, is dated somewhere between 117 AD and 138 AD, that is about three decades after the autograph. There are approximately 5,805 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, of which 323 are majuscules. The immense amount of the manuscripts exceeds all other ancient documents by hundreds of times. In addition, there are over 15,000 manuscripts in Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, Georgian, and Ethiopic versions. On top of that, there are 2,453 lectionary manuscripts and more than one million quotations of the New Testament by the church fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone in reconstructing the entire New Testament.
The wealth of material available for determining the exact wording of the original New Testament is overwhelming. Our dream is to collate all extant manuscripts of the Greek New Testament and publish them at this website. Currently, we are collating 6 uncials (majuscule script), 4 minuscules, and 2 ancient versions. More will be added later.
I am confronted with a sacred task, the struggle to regain the original form of the New Testament.
(Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-1874)
An introduction and guide to this online edition of Greek New Testament will be provided once this project is completed. PDF and XML versions of the text will also be made available for download.
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