FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is this website about?

The purpose of this website is make available the text of the Nestle Greek New Testament (not the copyrighted Nestle-Aland 27th edition, but the public domain Eberhard Nestle edition published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1904).

What are your sources?

For the text, I used the scanned books available at the Internet Archive (The first edition of 1904, and a reprinting from 1913 – the latter one has a better quality).

What is the importance of Nestle's Greek New Testament?

The current standard text of the Greek New Testament is the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition (the UBS GNT 4th edition has the same text, except for punctuation) - Since I first wrote this FAQ, the NA28 has been released. However, these texts are copyrighted. The early Eberhard Nestle is the closest public domain Greek New Testament to NA27/UBS4. The differences between Nestle 1904 and Nestle-Aland 27th are about 700 [Kurt and Barbara Aland - The text of the New Testament: an introduction to the critical editions and to the theory and practice of modern textual criticism – page 20].

The Nestle GNT has also the historical importance of being the first Greek New Testament edition to replace the Textus Receptus as the most widely printed edition for translators and exegetes.

How did you make the transcription?

Since Nestle largely adopted a majority reading of Westcott-Hort, Tischendorf and Weiss texts, I did almost the same. I used the Manuscript comparator to inspect the differences between Westcott-Hort and Tischendorf texts (One example from Mark 3). Where WH and Tischendorf agree, the text is also Nestle. Where they don't, I compared with the scan of the printed edition.

The next step I did was to include diacritics and punctuation. The SBL Greek New Testament was very useful to copy the diacritics of the matching words. Then I reviewed the resulting text with the scan word by word, and made corrections if needed.

Is your text copyrighted because you are using the SBLGNT?

The SBLGNT is a quality critical Greek New Testament edited by Michael Holmes. Although it is under a fairly permissive license, it is still copyrighted. So one can argue that my Nestle 1904 is copyrighted because it is “derived” from SBLGNT.

But the answer is no, because the final product of the Nestle 1904 edition of this website is still virtually identical to the old, public domain Nestle edition. SBLGNT was used as a source of comparison, not as the base text.

May I use the Nestle 1904 text?

Yes, you may use it wherever you want. You are not obliged to, but I ask you to refer to this website.

Who is responsible for this website?

My name is Diego Santos and my motivation to make the transcription of Nestle's text was to use it in a Bible Translation to Portuguese I've been doing.