Sunday, December 30, 2007

The Best Greek New Testament I read in 2007

At Christmas I got the new UBS Readers Greek New Testament.
That was only a few days ago, but I like it so much, it has to go on record as my favourite of 2007.

It is much bigger than the New Testaments I already possess.
This might mean that it doesn't look so sleek, but it also means that the print is bigger and the pages are thicker (in other words, no bleed).
This makes this the easiest GNT I have to read.
In fact the text is probably big enough to preach from (I haven't tried that though).
I've used it the last few days for my devotionals, and I've found the font so easy to read, that I've seen things in the text, that I think I would have missed with my Zondervan Readers Edition.

The UBS Readers GNT also has the following features:

-vocab lists at the bottom of each page for words that occur fewer than 30 times in the NT.

- a lexicon at the back

- parsing notes at the bottom of the page for difficult forms (that's what they say, but some of the ones they give are very easy)

- maps

I know that some people have complained that these features mean people will cheat and not learn the language, but I think that readers will find it more enjoyable to not look to the bottom of the page to try to find the parsing, and so it will be easy for most readers to motivate themselves to try and work out a form, rather than look it up.
On the plus side, I think that most people who do 1st year Greek, never read Greek again after that, and so a tool like this will be a really good way of getting Greek students to actually use their Greek, and start having devotionals with the Greek text.

For those of you who are starting the Greek course in a few days, this is the text that I recommend you get, but I don't think you will need it for a long time, so save your money for now - but plan to be having your devotionals with this baby, next September!