We live in an era that boasts of an embarrassment of riches for serious students of Greek, including a plethora of Greek New Testaments of all stripes. Yet for somebody like me (and most of my students) that favors traditional text-based Greek NTs over critical text/eclectic Greek NTs (I especially favor the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine, but also the various TRs and the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text), it is unfortunate that almost all of the various tools (e.g., reader's lexicons, textual commentaries) are geared towards critical text GNTs.
I was ecstatic, then, to recently discover The Greek New Testament: Textus Receptus, Reader's Edition, published in 2024 by Grange Press (Taylors, SC). This solves a specific need that I have had in my Greek classes here at BCM: a TR-based tool that provides almost all of the vocabulary that my students have not learned (given in side margins, see below), so that in theory a Bible student can, with three semesters' worth of Greek vocabulary, read through the entire Greek New Testament on their own without any additional helps.
The GNT:TR,RE, by official decree (specifically mine, but with my boss' blessing) now becomes the Greek New Testament of the Greek classes of our college, and will be used in translation projects, quizzes, tests, personal reading, etc. It replaces both the TBS TR that we had been using, as well as Burer and Miller's Reader's Lexicon which, though valuable, was critical-text based, gave away too many words, and is so radically free in some of its glosses it makes the NLT look like Young's Literal! (E.g., Colossians 2:24, klēronomia as "transcendent salvation." Seriously??!??!?! That's so loose of a translation that it virtually confuses sense with reference!).
Now, I do have one quibble with the GNT:TR,RE. Whereas Burer and Miller's Reader's Lexicon gave too many definitions, the GNT:TR,RE gives too few, at least for our Greek program. Basically, it provides words that occur 30 times or less, whereas my students after three semesters are supposed to know all words that occur 34x or more. To fix the gap, I basically created a handout of 38 words that they can stick in their New Testament, drawn from Metzger's Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek, with my slight modification on a few words.
I should note that the GNT:TR,RE (which is Scrivner's TR) also incudes a brief "Publisher's Introduction" that contains a defense of the TR and a criticism of eclectic methodology; I agree with much of what is written there, though naturally I would often phrase things a bit differently and would suggest that it may, perhaps, be a bit too polemic for an academic defense per se (to be fair, I write in my role as an ivory-tower academic, not a pastor). The GNT:TR,RE also includes F. H. A. Scrivner's Preface to the 1633 Novum Testamentum Graece). Significantly, the GNT:TR,RE claims a "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License," which means that "You re free to copy or redistribute this material in any medium or format with attribution and for non-commercial purposes only." I will also note that, as a hardcover book, at $37.50 plus S&H, this is a pretty good deal!
