The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research provides up-to-date discussions of every major aspect of New Testament textual criticism. Written by internationally acknowledged experts, the twenty-four essays evaluate all significant advances in the field since the 1950s.

The book deals with the appropriate application of the computer by textual critics, grammarians, exegetes, (Bible) translators and theologians. It contains directions for educational purposes and editors of journals and texts, the collation of mss and new projects are demonstrated. The computer can assist the researcher variously; by putting him/her in the position to deal with large corpora of data. Basic research can thus be executed more readily. Powerful search programmes such as Quest II are explained. The results of more sophisticated programming are demonstrated. Not just the micro unit, the lexeme, can be studied, for semantical purposes, but also the macro picture, such as syntactical structures. Finally the book deals with methodological issues pertaining to the appropriate application of the computer. Users are warned against unreflected use of computers.

The 30 essays by some of the most prominent scholars on the field of Septuagint studies collected in this volume deal with the Septuagint in general and with the Septuagint of Ezekiel in particular, but also with text-critical, philological, lexicographical and theological topics, faithfully reflecting the wide range of interests of Professor Johan Lust. Edited by F. Garca Martnez and Marc Vervenne.

Unlike earlier investigations on the changes Biblical Hebrew underwent over the ages, this study does not attempt to draw a broad picture encompassing various kinds of linguistic phenomena. The work stresses the need for a well-founded statistical and form-oriented methodology for the description of historical linguistic change in the Hebrew Bible. With the aid of computer techniques the book concentrates on one major aspect of Biblical Hebrew, viz. the verbal tense forms. It examines the absolute and relative frequencies of these data in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles in a comprehensive manner. In this way some of the established opinions concerning increase or decrease in the use of certain tense forms are confirmed, others contradicted, and new evidence is adduced. In addition to the statistical analyses, Verbs & Numbers contains a complete inventory of the parallel passages where Chronicles has another tense form than the Vorlage. This makes it a valuable source of information for the interpretation of the book of Chronicles.

Textual criticism is vital to scholars of ancient sacred texts, whether they are studying the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur’an, or the scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism. This book compares and contrasts the methodologies in different subfields and proposes a common ground for future textual scholarship.