Welcome to ALL THINGS BYZANTINE !
The Byzantine (majority text) are called Byzantine due to the location from where they generally were found, namely the Byzantine Empire (Asia-Minor). The tend to be later in their age then some other texts yet they do represent the vast majority of surviving NT manuscripts.
“The Byzantine Text is a family that contains 90%+ of all surviving Greek New Testament manuscripts” – Dr. Maurice Robinson
Below we have placed for ease of access and reference the most common Byzantine texts available for use. If you would like a more exhaustive location on where to research and find out more about these texts Feel free to press the button below, this will take you to the much more extensive byzantinetext.com, created by Dr. Maurice Robinson.
Robinson & Pierpont “Classic Text” 2005
The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Text form, 2005, compiled and arranged by Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont. The edition seeks to present as faithfully as possible the New Testament in the Byzantine text form, which the compilers also believe is exceedingly close to the original text of the New Testament.
Robinson & Pierpont “Readers Edition”2016
“The Greek New Testament for Beginning Readers” contains a number of valuable features: – A readable, non-italic font for the main body of Greek text – Footnotes containing brief definitions of words occurring less than fifty times – Word frequency counts to help the reader decide if a word should be memorized – Footnotes showing how to parse all verbs occurring less than fifty times – An alphabetized list of all other verb forms with parsing information – A lexicon showing proper names and all words occurring fifty times or more.
Robinson & Pierpont Text “2018 update”
The 2018 edition of the Robinson-Pierpont text has very few, and minor, text changes from the 2005 edition, including one corrected error of reading (based on misinterpretation of Hoskier’s data) at Rev 2:17 (now omits φαγειν) and John 18:11, 32, where a marginal reading has now become the main text and vice versa.
Robinson & Pierpont “Audio Version”
Read by Maurice Robinson himself, utilizing his 2005 edition of the “Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Text.”
Hodges & Farstad “Majority Text”
1982, The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text edited by Zane Hodges and Arthur Farstad, both of Dallas Theological Seminary. Seven years of labor went into the production of the Hodges-Farstad Text. The premise is that God would preserve his word thru the majority of all surviving manuscripts. it differs slightly from the Byzantine texts above however only slightly. the difference in the texts is primarily due to philosophy of transmission rather then text. The few points of variation would be in the book of revelation and in the passage of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11)