With the increasing availability of powerful Bible software, fewer and fewer students are learning to read the Bible in its original languages. The editors of The UBS Greek New Testament: A Reader’s Edition are concerned and have published the present volume to help students read the New Testament at an earlier stage in their learning. The goal of this edition is to provide the minimum aid to help students achieve sustained reading of the New Testament texts in the original Greek.
To accomplish this goal, this edition has a running lexicon of the rarest words in the Greek New Testament. All words that occur 30 times or less are footnoted with their parsing and a contextual gloss at the bottom of the page. This enables a student to concentrate on reading the text without the distraction and discouragement of flipping through a lexicon for every other word. The glosses are contextual and should not be substituted for detailed lexical study, but they are well suited to meet the goal of sustained reading.
The text is that of the UBS critical edition without the critical apparatus. This will enable students to move to the critical editions of the Greek New Testament with ease. Be sure to get the UBS version and not the one published by Zondervan which uses an alternative Greek text that has been manipulated to fit the NIV.
I have found The Reader’s Edition to be a great motivation allowing me to spend more and more time in the Greek of the New Testament. This tool will enable student’s with a first year understanding of the language to begin to live in the Greek Bible. The Reader’s Edition meets a significant need in the world of biblical studies and I highly recommend it to those eager to learn the Greek of the New Testament.
Comments