[B-Greek] UBS Reader's Edition GNT

Mark Lightman lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Sat Nov 17 22:40:03 EST 2007


I know that the value of these Reader's Editions have been discussed on this list before ,but it might be a good time to revisit it with the publication of this one and the second edition of Zondervan's about to come out any day now.
   
  Just my two cents.  I can see nothing but positives to these sorts of things.  I have the first edition of Zondervan's  A Reader's Greek New Testament and, despite the terrible font and despite the reversed engineered text, I still love it and use it all the time.  I take it with me on the bus, whenever I have a free second I can read a page or two of the Greek NT without having to have another book open, or even leaf through the back of the book.  If we want (and we do) people to read the Greek NT every day, why NOT make it easier.  The fact is, the more you read the thing, the less often you HAVE to look at the definitions, and now I only doit to check my self.  I'm pretty sure I know the meaning and form, but I can just glance down, confirm it and move on.  Of course I still use Bauer and Kittel for that matter, but would critics of a Reader's Edition suggest that I take all ten volumes with me on the bus before reading any Greek?
   
  The advantage of Zondervan's over the new UBS is that the former lists all the possible definitions of a word, but of course listing only one is okay too.  Isn't that what every translation is, a one word gloss?  Why is it okay to use a resource as long as it is not on the same page.  Again, it's only "cheating" if you don't try to figure it out first, and we do.
   
  In point of fact, I think we have the opposite problem to the one Carl alludes to.  We need MORE of these things, not less.  Here is the question I have.  What is the advantage of an UNmarked Greek NT?  Since none of us has Greek which is so good that we understand everything we read, we all benefit from using resources, so why not include them on the same page, whether a diglot or footnoted definitions/parsings?  I'm not talking interlinears here.  Again,  if all you do is read an unmarked text, without refering to translation or a dictionary, how does your Greek get better?  And why is okay to have a textual appartatus at the bottom of the page but not a translation or a dictionary, even if a limited one?  
Carl Conrad <cwconrad2 at mac.com> wrote:
  
On Nov 17, 2007, at 2:41 AM, James Spinti wrote:

> The UBS Reader's Edition has been released; I saw it this afternoon 
> at the ABS booth here at AAR/SBL and was able to take a screen shot 
> of a page. You can see it on my blog:
> http://anebooks.blogspot.com/2007/11/ubs-readers-edition.html
>
> Sorry, Carl, but they use Barclay Newman's dictionary for their 
> glosses. The layout is clean and seems easy to use, so if you are 
> interested in a nice "cheater" text, this might be one for you.

What a pity! I guess we could hardly expect otherwise, since the 
Newman glossary is commonly called "the UBS Lexicon" and has been 
bound with UBS editions or sold to accompany them. Your very nice 
photo reveals that it is, in fact, one tiny step shy of a full 
interlinear -- one has to go to a footnote on the same page rather 
than immediately under a Greek word for the minimal parsing info about 
each word --; and what's more, Newman's two- or three-word glossary is 
reduced to a one-word English gloss for each Greek word. It's another 
of these items that has been produced as a commercial response to a 
demand for quick "access" to the Greek NT by people with little or no 
competence in Greek. I don't doubt it will sell very well!

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)

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