The

Lexham
Greek-English
Interlinear
New Testament
SBL Edition

W. Hall Harris III

General Editor

THE LEXHAM GREEK-ENGLISH INTERLINEAR NEW TESTAMENT: SBL EDITION.

Copyright 2010 Logos Bible Software. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition is Copyright 2010 Logos Bible Software and the Society of Biblical Literature.

All rights reserved.

Preface to the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament

Interlinear translations of the Greek New Testament have sometimes been dismissed as “crutches” for those Bible students who do not know the original languages. With the advent of computer technology and the ability to link and relate words and phrases across documents, however, they have begun to come into their own as a preferred starting point for in-depth Bible study, sometimes even for people who do indeed know some Greek. Unlike some popular Reverse Interlinear New Testaments like the KJV or ESV which began with an existing English translation and “paired” it with the Greek text to produce an interlinear translation, the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament began with the The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition and created essentially a fresh English translation to accompany that Greek text.

Following the existing model of the Lexham Hebrew-English Interlinear Bible, the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament actually presents the user with two levels of interlinear translation rather than just one. The first is the lexical value line, which gives a translational gloss of the lexical (or dictionary) form of the Greek word, though even here some contextual sensitivity is present, since often biblical Greek words will have more than one major category of possible meaning, as indicated by major headings under the word entry in a Greek-English lexicon. In such cases the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament chooses the gloss from the appropriate category of meaning. The second level of interlinear translation provided is the English literal translation itself, a much more contextually sensitive translation that reads much like standard English, following the order of the subscripted numbers provided in places where the word order of the Greek text differs significantly from that of the English translation. In cases where the literal rendering is not so clear to a contemporary English reader, additional help is provided in the form of notes which render particular Greek idiomatic expressions into their English equivalents.

There are some further unique advantages to the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament. First, the primary reference work behind the lexical glosses (and even a significant number of the contextualized translations) is the outstanding third edition of Walter Bauer’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), edited by F. W. Danker. This work is recognized around the world by New Testament scholars as the “gold standard” and starting point for all lexical ...