[B-Greek] The Reader's GNT
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Fri Apr 16 22:54:27 EDT 2004
I saw this today at Mardel Bookstore in Lewisville, TX. Retail price $29.99.
I have mixed feelings about it.
It's softbound, with a buckskin-type leather(?) cover. It's like a very thin thinline Bible. The pages are sewn. It's very light, flexible, and portable, even if it's too large to fit in one's pocket.
I don't like the font. It looks like a thin italic version of the font used for the lexical entries in BDAG, i.e., the rho has its "tail" curled under the circle. It's more difficult to read than either NA-27 or UBS-4.
The paper is bright white (acid-free) and appears to be thin "Bible" paper, but it's less opaque than NA-27 or UBS-4. The bright white paper, the thin font, and the not-opaque-enough paper make it less than ideal for easy reading. NA's and UBS's off-white color is much easier on the eyes. Even if the paper used by UBS and NA were no thicker or no more opaque, they would still be easier to read than the RGNT because of their font style and the off-white color of their pages.
The "words-that-occur-30-times-or-less" are footnoted on the bottom of the page, but they run left to right one right after another, which makes it somewhat difficult to find the word, unless you keep your finger where you last looked. My suggestion/preference would have been that they use two columns and go from top to bottom in each column. That would make it much easier to find the word by its footnote number, and using two columns would ensure that shorter word definitions would not have much wasted white space (as might be the case if they used just one column with each new word on a separate line, like Perschbacher does in his REFRESH YOUR GREEK). I assume they did what they did for optimal space considerations.
The RGNT gives the UBS reading in a footnote where it differs from the NIV Greek text (Goodrick back-reconstructed the NIV Greek text, and that is the basis for this Greek text).
The introduction about how and why students who learn only every word that occurs 50x or more (as in Mounce's book) are not equipped to read the Greek New Testament seemed a bit tedious.
I think it's probably a useful tool, but students will have to know their forms, as the footnotes do not give parsing information (unlike Pershbacher's REFRESH YOUR GREEK -- if Pershbacher's book could be reprinted in a flexible binding on sufficiently-opaque paper so that it would be only half its thickness, it would be my preference by far).
Because of the font, paper, and format of the RGNT, some may prefer to use the Nestle-Aland GREEK-ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT with the RSV translation on the facing page as a sort of "reader's Greek New Testament" (i.e., something that you can read without having to search a lexicon for each unknown word), though it costs twice as much and is not as hand-holdable.
This is just my opinion. YMMV (your mileage may vary)
Eric S. Weiss
http://www.geocities.com/papaweiss1/index.htm
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