BOOK REVIEWS MAURICEA. ROBINSONand WILLISG. PIERPONT,The New Testamentin the Original Greek accordingto the ByzantinelMajorityTextform (Atlanta: Original Word Publishers, 1991), pp. lvii & 510. U.S. $24.95 paperback. Those who have been reluctant to encourage the monopolizing tendencies of the United Bible Societies by accepting their Greek New Testament (or Nestle- Aland26) as a text that until recently was promoting itself as the "standard" text have at their disposal several different editions that really are standard texts, in the sense that they are all attempts to represent the Byzantine type of text. There is the Patriarchal New Testament of 1904 used by the orthodox Church: this is based on the text of the lectionaries and in that sense can be seen as a genuine liv- ing text; the Trinitarian Bible Society markets a version of the Textus Receptus based on Scrivener's edition of Beza's 1598 text which underlies the New Testa- ment of the Authorized version; then in 1982 (2 1985)Hodges and Farstad's Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text ( = H&F) appeared. This latest edition makes a fourth. Robinson and Pierpont ( = R&P) have issued a Byzantine text, the title to which deliberately recalls the title to Westcott and Hort's New Testament of 1881. R&P's main aim is to produce a text that agrees with the distinctively Byzantine mss. and not one that necessarily agrees with the bulk of extant mss.. It would be of interest to have been given a list of the readings they print that do not have the support of the majority of mss.. They have not attempted to establish their text by means of a sheer count of mss., especially where the Byzantine texts are divided among themselves. R&P generally follow von Soden's K group and his Kx in par- ticular but they are not concerned to accept the majority for its own sake. The use of the word 'majority' in their title is there 'solely to provide a link with the popularly-espoused concept of "Majority Text" theory' (p. liii). They speak of a Byzantine text form rather than a text-type, because in their theory the Byzantine text represents the original text-it was not a recension or a revision, but a text that survived from the beginning. The.editors' history of the text is spelled out in their Introduction. They argue that the autograph copies were corrupted early and this accounts for the variety of text-types in the earliest extant mss. but that after Constantine the conditions were appropriate for the church gradually to set about establishing a more or less unified text of the New Testament created from the reliable readings in a wide spectrum of mss.. This text was deemed to be the original text, and it was the text we call the Byzantine text. Quite how "the church" recognised a reliable text from a secondary reading is not made clear. There are other queries and difficulties in the editors' reconstruction of the history of the text, although it is commendable that they have acknowledged that textual criticism requires its practitioners to show an awareness that the New Testament ms. tradition does indeed have a history! Conventional arguments against theories favouring the Byzantine text such as the lack of early Byzantine mss. and the alleged paucity of Byzantine readings in the early fathers are dealt with by the editors in their Introduction. They take comfort from Harry Sturz's work that shows links between readings in the early papyri and late Byzantine mss. and they argue, probably convincingly, that modern critics are so preoccupied in avoiding readings found in early mss. 198 that happen to be in agreement with Byzantine readings that the high percentage of such "Byzantine" readings in early mss. is overlooked. As far as the fathers are concerned a similar argument is employed, namely that scholars this century have been blind to the high proportion of Byzantine readings in a patristic citation. R&P are not prepared to accept the oft-stated view that any Byzantine-type reading in a patristic text is likely to be the result of a later scribe's harmonizing of a Biblical citation to the prevailing text (scil. Byzantine) in his own day. Arguments such as these make it increasingly necessary for the sympathetic or uncommitted scholar (which should include every true scholar!) to investigate the character of all Biblical citations in all early church fathers (possibly using Asterius as a fulcrum) within the text-critical history of the patristic text itself. The major problems I have with R&P's history are a) how the Byzantine text emerged as the dominant text from amidst the freewheeling and chaotic conditions hitherto prevailing and b) why that resultant text represents the original words of the original authors. I have no difficulty in accepting that the bulk of deliberate changes in the New Testament are likely to have been in existence prior to 200 A.D., as orthodox scribes would have been disinclined to tamper with holy writ once it had achieved canonical status, and no-one can deny the eventual dominance of the Byzantine text, but it does seem to be just as much a leap in the dark to say that the Byzantine text emerged, reconstructed and reestablished through a gradual process by which the church came to realise that this text-type and no other preserved the monopoly of original readings (a process that the editors seem to imply was due to the self-evidence of truth-they are too scholarly to allow words like providential protection on to their pages) than to say, as many still do, that this text-type was the result of a formal revision officially authorized even though there is no historical evidence for such a revision being instigated. Could it not equally be possible that what we call the Byzantine text-type emerged from the local texts found in a part of the church that remained Greek speaking after other areas e.g. in Egypt, N. Africa, W. Europe and the Middle East had jettisoned Greek mss. in favour of their own vernaculars? But even if we grant R&P their historical reconstruction, there is no guarantee that their printed text is the original more so than any other. Often, Byzantine readings may be original but this judgement can only be arrived at after each variant is discussed on its own merits case by case. Now to the text itself. There are some 1500 differences between this edition (and indeed H&F) and any edition of the Textus Receptus ( = TR). This text lacks Acts 8:37; 9:5b-6a; 15:34; 24:7; I John 2:23b; 5:7b and (depending on which edition of the TR is used) Luke 17:36. The order of Matt. 23:13 and 14 is reversed. The doxology at Rom. 16:25 is given as 14:24-6. Elsewhere the Trinitarian Society's TR differs from R&P (and H&F) at e.g. Matt. 3:8 3:11 + xai 4:18 + 6 5:47 &8e?c?ouS(TR = NA 26!)/ Inevitably the resultant text differs but little from H&F. When the majority is divided, especially over a a.l. that gives a choice between a longer and a shorter text, the word(s) in dispute are often found bracketed in this new edition. But there are other differences between H&F and R&P, e.g. Matt. 11 : 16H&F: i-c6potqR&P: ?Taipov5;Acts 4:17 7:38 22:12 su?a[ii?5 / Eph.5:21 1 0eo6/xpi?1Io6;II Tim 1:1Xpvaiou 'I71aou/'Incro6XpLa-zo5; jas.5:11 1 d'3&'ce The biggest differences between these editions occur in the pericope of the adulteress and in the Book of Revelation. H&F adopted a stemmatic approach in the mss. they used for these sections. The main differences in the adulteress passage are as follows: John 8:11 H&F: xal 6 'Irlaous / R&P: 8e; 8:2 fia0img /-; fiX0ev/ 1t\Xp?¡év?'to;6 'ITiao5?/ -; 1tpOçal<6v / [ ] ; 8:3 èv / iv 8:4 d1toV/ .