Through a partnership with the German Bible Society, SBL is pleased to present these resource for text-critical work to its members.

Textual Resources from the German Bible Society

Read more about the scholarly editions of biblical texts from the German Bible Society in the e-booklet Textual Research on the Bible. Through a partnership with the German Bible Society, the reading texts (upper texts, without critical apparatus) of four editions are available to SBL members in several formats for download and personal use.

Learn more at the German Bible Society website.

• The digital edition of the SBLGNT is freely available for download.
• The print edition of the SBLGNT can be purchased directly from SBL.

*A Note Regarding the Relationship between the SBLGNT and the NA and UBS Texts  

The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (SBLGNT) is not a standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament; rather, it is a critically edited edition. Instead of its apparatus recording variants readings among manuscripts, it records differences in other published editions of the Greek New Testament. In so doing, the SBLGNT is a "reading edition" that alerts readers to text-critical issues.

With regard to its text, the Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (SBLGNT) stands as an alternative to, for example, the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 editions (identical since 1975). Given that all these editions in different ways trace their roots back to the influential edition and methods of Westcott & Hort, it is no surprise that they present a similar text in many respects. In the more than 540 places where the SBLGNT differs from the others, however, the differences are generally due to the circumstance that the SBLGNT reflects a somewhat different approach to textual criticism, particularly with regard to the history of the transmission of the text, than that followed by the editorial committee responsible for the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 texts (to the extent that that approach is exhibited in the Textual Commentary edited by Bruce M. Metzger on behalf of the editorial committee and in the Alands’ volume on The Text of the New Testament), and therefore sometimes reaches a different assessment of the evidence.

With respect to its apparatus, the SBLGNT stands in a complementary relationship to the apparatuses presented respectively by the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 editions. The future format of a critical apparatus is likely to be electronic and linked to online manuscript evidence. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to invest resources in this type of limited apparatus of manuscript evidence. It would be inappropriate, however, to leave the reader of the SBLGNT with no guide to the places where the manuscript tradition exhibits noteworthy variation. So a decision was reached to present an apparatus displaying the textual decisions of five editions of the Greek NT. This apparatus informs the reader of the presence of selected textual variants, concisely indicates how representative editions have handled the matter, and alerts the reader of the need to consult a fuller apparatus—such as those presented in the NA and UBS editions—for more information about the variants and the evidence supporting them.

 

 

Though not necessarily the most current lexica, the lexica digitally available on the Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies represent tremendously important works and are an outstanding resource for working in the languages of biblical studies, including biblical and rabbinnic Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic.