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Title: The Greek New Testament According To The Majority Text : Second Edition by Zane Hodges, Arthur L. Farstad ISBN: 0-8407-4963-5 Publisher: Nelson Reference Pub. Date: 30 April, 1982 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $39.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (10 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent resource with comprehensive critical sigla
Comment: For those interested in textual criticism and wanting a different perspective from the Metzger-Aland paradigm, this volume is a good start. While individual MSS are not cited, one can still gain a plethora of information from the textual apparatus, which gives comparisons in regards to the various subgroups of M, the Critcal Text (Nestle-Aland/UBS), the TR, and the Coptic (Alexandrian) witnesses.

Areas for improvement: The critical apparati could use some cosmetic changes to facilitate easier reading. Of added benefit might be an appendix indicating all of the singular readings of the various cited witnesses, and perhaps adding citations from ALL uncials 6th century and before.

The stemmatic reconstruction of Revelation is intriguing, but the benefit to it may be further enhanced by including an appendix of where HF's Revelation disagrees with Robinson-Pierpont.

A very economically priced volume and very portable.

Rating: 3
Summary: Good, but Maurice A. Robinson's book is better
Comment: New Testament in the Original Greek : According to the Byzantine-Majority Textform by Maurice A. Robinson is a better choice, because it's better quality both in print quality and in content then "The Greek New Testament According to Majority Text by Arthur L. Farstad (Editor), Zane C. Hodges (Editor)". The book by Robinson binding quality is simply superb and the Greek lettering is easy to read. The author seem to have avoided allowing his own personal believes (what ever they might be) influence his selection of Greek text and has followed a better method then Farstad/Hodges (which used von Soden's method) of deciding what is the majority reading. Therefore the Greek is closer to the Textus Receptus reading which the translators of the King James Version of the Holy Bible used. As much as I like the "Interlinear KJV Parallel New Testament in Greek and English by George Ricker Berry", I have to say I prefer Robinson's book. The reason why is because the book by Berry is very badly printed by Zondervan Publishing House. The Greek text is simply unreadable in places and the typesetting, choice of Greek font and layout (not straight in some places) indicate that they simply don't care about quality, but your money. Probably that's why they are the biggest publisher of that rubbish called NIV.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Must-Have
Comment: I 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.