Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener (1813–1891)

This Greek text (Scrivener 1881) is the Greek text which corresponds best to the 1611 King James Version. The Scrivener text is a modified Beza 1598 Textus Receptus in which changes have been made to reflect the readings chosen by the KJV translators. Scrivener’s intent was to artificially create a Greek text that closely matched the translator-modified Textus Receptus text and the resulting English version. This is a useful text for comparison for those with proficiency in Greek.

Further, this edition of the text is fully morphologically tagged with the Logos Bible Software morphology; it also includes lemma (dictionary) forms and Strong’s numbers for every word in the Greek text.… (mais)

Here's a scary thought: This book is a century and a half old, and there still isn't a decent replacement.

Scrivener produced probably the most detailed book on New Testament Textual Criticism -- the reconstruction of the original Greek New Testament based on the later corrupt copies -- ever issued in English. It gives descriptions of almost all of the hundreds of Greek manuscripts known in Scrivener's time, plus information on "versions" (translations) into other ancient languages such as Latin and Syriac. No other source supplied so much detail.

Sadly, almost all of that information is out of date. Manuscripts are designated by letter (if they are in "uncial" or upper-case script) or number (if in "minuscule" or lower-case) -- and, because the notation was getting very confused by the end of the nineteenth century, there were two different lists in use (one by Scrivener and one by Tischendorf), and early in the twentieth century, Caspar Rene Gregory replaced both lists. So a great deal of the information in Scrivener is locked away behind a set of symbols no one uses any more.

Plus Scrivener tended to believe in a method of textual criticism (that based on the so-called "Byzantine" or "Syrian" text) that was not widely accepted in his time, and is even less accepted now. Worse, his follower Miller, who produced the fourth edition of this book after Scrivener died, was even more extremely biased toward the Byzantine text, so many of his revisions were tendentious.

What this all boils down to is that Scrivener's book is no longer a plain introduction to textual criticism or anything else, because so much of it is out of date. The other side of the coin is, there is no other place to find all this information! So you can't start your textual studies with this book; you'll need something newer to begin with. But if you learn enough, and have a conversion table for Scrivener's symbols, this book will be invaluable. It's a tragedy something equivalent has not been produced today -- if such a book came out, I would demote Scrivener/Miller from four stars to one. But as long as there is no "New Scrivener," four stars are what it deserves.… (mais)