Talk:Westcott and Hort

Change Title of Article

Because this edition is widely known as Westcott and Hort, I suggest to change the title of the Article in Westcott and Hort, and to edit consequently the first lines, making anyway reference to the formal name. Title The New Testament in the Original Greek is to generic to be searched, and it is impossible to find Westcott and Hort in the relevant categories, for instance [Category:Greek New Testament]. A ntv (talk) 17:55, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I have to agree. The title has also been used on more than one different edition of the Greek New Testament. For example, in 2005, the Greek New Testament edited by Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont was published under the same title. Also, to entitle this article "The New Testament in the Original Greek" is to imply that Westcott and Hort have published _the_ definitive Greek New Testament--an assertion that would be disagreed with by the vast majority of scholars and Bible students.

Sorry. This comment was something I put in a few months ago without signing. Fontwords (talk) 16:52, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Robinson and Pierpont named their edition (a Majority Text edition) "in the Origiinal Greek" just to assert a sort of parity with W&H, and explained this in their intro. Sussmanbern (talk) 04:14, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

W&H used for translations

A lot of english translations or revisions used the Text of W&H for translations e.g. Revised Standard Version. The reader could benefit if those were mentioned. Some bibles still depend on this text today, especialy in not so common languages.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 16:17, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Error: The RSV was not based on W&H but on the Nestle critical edition (17th ed. mostly)(see article on the RSV) and possibly Merk and Von Soden, as the RSV edition makes clear that it is making use of considerable manuscript evidence accumulated since the time of W&H. However, several other - mostly forgotten - English translations were based strictly on W&H; Goodspeed, New World (Jehovahs Witness), Basic English, and some others; a curious fact is that these translations are sufficiently different from each other that that casual reader may not realize that they are all translations of the same text. I take this matter seriously because KJVO propagandists have blamed Westcott & Hort for every variant from the KJV in the RV and every subsequent version of the New Testament. In fact, the W&H Greek text was not the basis of the RV of 1881; the actual Greek text was edited by Archdeacon Edwin Palmer, a member of the NT Committee of the RV, The Greek Testament with the Readings adopted by the Revisers of the Authorised Version, (1882, Oxford, Clarendon Press)[in 1910 this was reissued with an elegant Latin title with a very nice apparatus criticus by Alexander Souter]. The same year (1882) Bishop Charles J. Ellicott, chairman of the NT Committee, and Archdeacon Edwin Palmer published The Revisers and The Greek Text of the New Testament by Two Members of the New Testament Company (1882, London, Macmillan & Co.), in which they asserted that out of the entire New Testament only 64 variants were adopted from W&H (this is very probably an overcount, as Palmer was looking up sources other than W&H for variants from the footnotes in Scrivener's edition of the Stephanus Textus Receptus, which was not exhaustive on this topic). Of the RV's NT Committee, four members besides Westcott and Hort had already published their own critical editions of the Greek NT. In 1895 the American edition of W&H's NT (primarily the text of the first volume - the second volume was almost never republished) deliberately contained (starting at page xciii) a very long list of hundreds of "noteworthy variations" between the RV and W&H - just to show that the RV was not a translation straight from W&H. Sussmanbern (talk) 04:08, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

My original statement about the text of W&H beeing the base for the Revised Standard Version is not accurate. Somehow I got it mixed up with the Revised Version. The RV is strongly based on the works of W&H but not in total. Both were members of the 50 scholars who made the RV and they did in fact managed to dismiss the "textus receptus" in many cases. But there are still some translations out there, that depend on this text. In fact the German Version of New World has a very strange base: It is the english translation of the W&H, which is translated from English to German (and many other languages) so the translator does not necessarily need to know Hebrew and Greek, just English. However the problems of New World is not atributed to the text of W&H. Besides the fact that W&H is now outdated after some 140 years of scolarship, it is still remarkably close to the up to date texts of Nestle-Aland. Even in the cases where W&H disagrees with NA they still cum up very often with a text that is much closer to NA than to textus receptus. I think when there were five variant readings you might consider NA has the best choice most of the time and W&H sometimes has the second best choice, but still not bad. So W&H did some 3 quarters of the way from textus receptus to todays Greek text editions. Most of the theory of W&H ist just wrong as we know today, but they still somhow got the right results. As far as I know W&H is still in print.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 16:12, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm afraid I must disagree with you again. Besides Bishops Westcott and Hort, (at least) four other members of the RV's New Testament Committee had already published their own critical editions of the Greek New Testament - Wordsworth, Alford, Tregelles, and Scrivener (altho Scrivener's edition was a 'TR' text he had running footnotes on variants from other, critical, editions); so neither W nor H overwhelmed or dominated the NT Committee. In fact, for some odd reason, after the publication of the RV, some distinguished people exerted considerable effort to show that the RV was NOT BASED on the W&H text. The year after the RV's NT was published, Archdeacon Edwin Palmer edited and published The Greek Testament with the Readings Adopted by the Revisers (1882, Oxford, Clarendon Press) - essentially the text of Scrivener's TR edition with only such changes as necessary to conform to the RV's English, and with footnotes calling attention to all of those changes (but not bothering to provide their provenance). And then Bishop Charles J. Ellicott (chairman of the NT Committee) and the aforementions Archdeacon Palmer wrote and published The Revisers and the Greek Text of the New Testament (1882, London, Macmillan and Co.), a booklet devoted to showing that the RV was worked up with virtually no input from W&H, Palmer expressly says that out of the many hundreds of changes from the TR text almost all were supported by critical editions prior to W&H and only 64 were attributable to W&H in the absence of an earlier source -- Palmer's number sounds very precise but even so it may be an overcount as he probably figured the earlier attributions from the notes in Scrivener's TR editions - and Scrivener's notes, although very helpful, were not exhaustive, so Palmer only thought those variants had no source earlier than W&H; anyway, Palmer does not list those 64, so we do not know what they are, but 64 is a mere drop in the bucket in the RV. In 1895, in Revised American Edition of W&H's Greek NT, an added feature is a very long list (starting at page xciii and running to page civ - 12 pages) of hundreds of "noteworthy variants" between the RV and W&H, to further show that the RV doesn't follow W&H. Although W&H's text has a big reputation and was, for a decade or two, widely adopted, its theoretical foundations are imperfect. It simply assimilated the two oldest Greek codices (both of the 4th century) with only a little attention to other ancient sources, and almost immediately after publication there was the discovery of a wealth of papyri going back to the 1st century and including hundreds of NT fragments predating the codices used by W&H. W&H text can now be called "minimalistic", in the sense that the entire text of W&H can safely be assumed to go back to the lost autographs and there is no good reason to delete anything from the W&H text ... but there might be very strong reasons to add some things from other ancient sources. Sussmanbern (talk) 18:23, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

To come back to my original question: There are some translations out there (not neccesarily in English), that depend on the WH text. Can sombody find out which translations and revisions are WH based?--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:09, 4 November 2018 (UTC)

To answer your question, translations straight from the Westcott & Hort Greek NT include the Twentieth Century NT, the Edgar Goodspeed NT, the New World Translation (ca 1961-1971, Jehovah's Witnesses; they also published in 1969 "The Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures" which purports to be the WH text with running interlinear word-for-word English and their New World translation in a parallel column), the Basic English version, the Ferrar Fenton translation, and possibly some others. Unlike the RV, these claim to be strictly from the WH Greek text. Most of these are long out of print. Sussmanbern (talk) 19:55, 6 September 2020 (UTC)