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
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.
Textual Resources from the Society of Biblical Literature
The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition, edited by
Michael W. Holmes (SBLGNT)*
SBL in association with Logos Bible Software
offers a new, critically-edited Greek New Testament in electronic and print formats. See more information on the relationship between
the SBLGNT and the UBS and Nestle-Aland texts below.
The text of
the SBLGNT is encoded in a Unicode-compliant font so users can exchange
files easily without having to secure a special Greek font. Users may use SBLGreek or any other Unicode
font that supports the full range of Greek characters.
*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.