An Introduction to the Greek New Testament by Dirk Jongkind
There is a certain delicious joy in discovering that our trust in the New Testament as an historically reliable text is based on scholarship that is obsessively precise, unashamedly pedantic, and ruthlessly honest. The soul sings for joy, and feeds freely and fully on clean healthy food. Such freedom-bestowing scholarship is characteristic of Dirk Jongkind and the team at Tyndale House in Cambridge. In fact, it was Jongkind’s academic rigour, his strictness when it came to the text of the New Testament, that first caused me to write to him, announcing myself as a ‘fan’ and asking if we could meet at the Lausanne Congress in 2010. Although we came from different church traditions (and he very much the scholar, and me very much the dufus) our excited, energetic conversation that day, and the next, and the next, was easily the highlight of the conference for me. Jongkind’s credentials are outstanding (see his Scribal Habits of Codex Sinaiticus) but in this Introduction he has given us a very accessible book on a complex and important subject.
You don’t need to have any Greek at all to be able to enjoy this book. That’s because it’s not only an intro to the Tyndale House Edition of the NT (‘the most accurate edition of the Greek New Testament published so far’) but it’s also an outstanding introduction to the process of NT textual criticism itself. There are insights into how decisions are made in manuscript selection so that we get the most accurate text possible, as well as interesting sections on how to deal with variations.
We often hear it boldly stated that the NT has changed over the centuries and people have deliberately messed with the text to change its meaning. Jongkind writes, ’Another way of answering the reliability question is to look for signs of deliberate tampering with the text. People have claimed to have found these, but they have also had to admit that these are few and far between and do not occur on the scale and frequency that one might expect if there were an attempt to systematically change the text. The phenomenon that comes closest to deliberate alteration of the text is the cleaning up of the spelling that we encounter in the older manuscripts, which is at time rather rough.’ (p.22) Apparently Byzantine scribes in particular just couldn’t let bad spelling go uncorrected.
Another statement on reliability gives us the broader context in which variants emerge: ‘For most of the approximately 135,000 words of the New Testament, no decision has to be made – either because there is no variation or because the variation is found in a single manuscript, in a group of relatively unimportant manuscripts, or in a subset of late manuscripts.’ (p.65) Jongkind then outlines the criteria (external evidence, copying, and internal evidence) on which to make reliable decisions where one is necessary.
Much more could be said, but this 120-page gem will put some steel into you, and help you have yet more confidence in the reliability of the New Testament text. Many new translations into many languages will be based on the Tyndale House Edition, but even if you don’t read Greek, it is heartwarming to know that, behind the scenes, scholars like Jongkind are still working hard on every available text, and are still confirming that what we have in our hands when we pick up our Bible is fundamentally what was originally written. Feast on my friends! Feast on!
An Introduction to the Greek New Testament Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge by Dirk Jongkind is published by Crossway Books.
©2020 Lex Loizides
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