Customer Reviews

The NKJV Greek-English Interlinear New Testament

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For those of us using the NKJV, this is very helpful to have. The quality of the information presented is excellent but I have to say the binding and paper quality are horrible. Nelson should be ashamed of themselves. The binding is of the same poor quality as their concordance. It feels like it's going to fall apart with any serious use. The paper looks to be recycled. It's a shame that Nelson doesn't have the integrity to produce reference materials that reflect the subject they are working with.

The layout of the pages is clean and neat, the paper is nice, the size is convenient, the typeface is legible, and the word studies are useful and easy to find. True, notes on the parsing of each word would be useful too, but would probably mess up the clarity of the page. Guess we'll just have to actually study some Greek, if we want to know everything. But with some basic study of Greek (in the regretably unavailable book by Jim Found, Basic Greek in 30 minutes a day, I am able to look for myself at the Greek text and see exactly how the sentences are put together, the literal meaning of the Greek, and the translation choices that the NKJV has made. This book is well worth owning for anyone who wants to be able to think for themselves about the New Testament. And that is well worth thinking about!

When it comes to interlinear Bibles there is generally not a lot of difference between them. However, this one has one particular feature that sets it apart from other ones I have examined. Even with each word translated beneath the Greek word the Greek sentence structure can still make it difficult to correctly translate a sentence. To help with this problem when words need to be reordered so they conform to English rules then the text includes a number by each of the words so you can easily put them in the appropriate sequence. This is a very helpful feature.

In addition to the interlinear translation on the right side of each page is the New King James Version translation for the passages on that page. This makes it easy to go from the Greek to the translation of each word and then to the final translated text.

At the back of the book is a section titled Word Studies, but it is more like a basic dictionary than a true word study. Each entry has the Greek word, transliteration, definition, and a single reference in the New Testament.

While the Word Studies section may be of minimal value the rest of the text is excellently done with idioms also combined and translated. With the sequencing of the words and translation of idioms in addition to the expected word for word translation "The NKJV Greek-English Interlinear New Testament" is a highly recommended purchase for anyone looking for an Interlinear Bible.

If you want access to a full-featured New Testament, givng you the opportunity to view the Greek text in interlinear format, with translator's notes for the three main Greek sources, plus word studies on slected Greek words, all combined with the New King James Version, this is your book. Very reasonably priced for a hardcover. The New King James version is a slightly updated version of the origianl King James version, easier to read and understand but still in keeping with the version of the Bible amny of us were raised on. All-in-all, an instructive and enjoyable book for bible study.

I've been enjoying this book for the three years while going to Seminary and in my home Bible classes. Very practical and handy book. NASB, of course, could be even better as a parallel text, but NKJ sometimes suggest an even better flow of thought. Too bad, it does not have a Greek-English dictionary in the end. Some grammatical notations above the words might have been of some help as well.

I myself have not taken any Koine Greek studies but I do plan to in the future. This is a great aid for beginners and advanced users alike. This book utilizes the Greek Majority Text. This set of text claims the most Greek manuscripts than any other text. The textus receptus, the Greek text of the King James Version, is included in this set of manuscripts. This translation of the New Testement, a nterlinear one, puts a literal translation of EACH Greek word right under the word. This way you can get a completely pure and unbias translation of the Greek. You can get down to the original meaning of the text, without having to deal with idioms and pharaphrasing which take away from the purpose of the text. If you get a little stuck with abnormal phrasing (which is common with interlinear translations because of the difference between Koine Greek and modern English) then there probably will be an idiomatic translation of that phrase just under the interlinear text. Last but not least, in the left margin, next to the corresponding text, is the New King James Version translation of the text. You can compare this understandable literal translation with the purely literal translation of the interlinear translation side-by-side. I would recommend this product with an Greek-English Interlinear using the Critical Text as opposed to the Majority Text or the Textus Receptus. This way you can compare the Majority Text, which has the most acient manuscript backing, with the most widely accepted (including language scholars) Greek set of manuscripts today (the Critical Text) The translation most likely to be coupled with the Critical Text is the New Revised Standard Version. I would also recommened getting a beginner's guide to New Testement Greek so that you can read the Greek text for yourself. Both of the products I just mentioned are readily availible by different authors here at Amazon.com My final regards to this product is that it has been a blessing to my Biblical studies :-)

A well done interlinear. This interlinear is based on the New Testament Greek text which has a long, continuous, widely-accepted lineage. The Byzantine/Majority textform is the version of the New Testament accepted and widely used in parishes as authoritative since the New Testament was standardized many, many centuries ago. The Nestle-Aland/UBS textform is a contrived text with no historical church usage. With so many modern Bible versions based on the NA/UBS text, it is wonderful to see the New Testament used by the church Fathers in a well done interlinear English translation.

I really love this book - it has helped me enormously learning Biblical Greek. The four step translation process - Greek, literal translation, a more polished translation, then King James - really helped me get to the nuts & bolts of the Greek Bible while I am learning Greek at my own (slow) pace. My only complaints are that the pages are too thin and the word study at the end of the book is too short. I really have no opinion on the "my Bible can beat up your Bible" debate other than that it is rather silly in that the differences between Greek versions are for the most part trivial. The real differences are in the translations, explanations, and glosses.

Farstad et al. _The NKJV Greek English Interlinear New Testament_ (Thomas Nelson, 1994) is one of the nicest interlinear Bible texts I have seen. In addition to the running Greek text and interlinear translations there is an intermittent extra layer of translations underneath the interlinear that resolve idioms and smooth out the syntax at difficult points. In addition, outside the outer margins of the Greek and English interlinear text there is a continuous English translation that corresponds closely - though not exactly (see below) - to the interlinear one, as well as variant readings and identifications of quoted passages and occasional word studies of important words and phrases (over 300 in all, indexed at the end of the book), all keyed to the Greek text by small numbers or other symbols and also labeled by chapter and verse.

All the type faces - and especially the Greek ones - are very readable. The main Greek text (though not the variant readings) are completely and correctly accented. The interlinear translations are very well laid out, and the pages, though filled with information of multiple types, have a very neat and clean appearance. The only thing I would have liked that is not there is some indication in the continuous translation of the very useful division of the main text into sections with titles and cross-references.

If there is a weakness to the book, it is the slightly odd relationship between the Greek text and the running translation. The Greek text is referred to in the book as the Majority Text and seems to be a recent modern redaction of what is generally termed the Byzantine text type. The translation is called the New King James Version (NKJV), not, it would seem, due to any dependency on the English of the original King James Version (KJV), but because it is based on the same Greek text as the original version, namely the so-called Textus Receptus or "received text".

The point is that the main Greek text of the book - the Majority Text - and the text underlying the running English translation - the Textus Receptus - while very similar, are not the same. Both are representatives of the Byzantine text type. You can think of the Textus Receptus as an early precursor to the Majority Text, or you can think of the Majority text as an updated version of the Textus Receptus. Either way, they are fairly closely related to each other, and stand at a similar distance from the more speculative reconstructed text of Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Societies, which give much more weight to texts - including very early texts - of what is termed the Alexandrian text type.

As already noted, the main Greek text of the book is the Majority text. The editors denote it by M. As far as I can tell they rarely if ever use it in the variant readings, the reason being simply that they always give the reading of M in the main text. They denote the Textus Receptus as TR, and the reconstructed "critical text" of Nestle-Aland and the United Bible Society as NU. The TR variants show what readings were most widely recognized from the Renaissance through the KJV to today (to the extent they have not been supplanted by modern editorial readings) - as well as what readings are actually reflected in the running NKJV translation. The NU readings show the readings that old sources and modern textual criticism indicate are the best.

Accepting that the editors wanted to offer a traditional (Byzantine) as opposed to a reconstructed (Alexandrian) text, one still has to wonder why, if they thought the TR was good enough for the translation, they didn't think it was good enough for the main Greek text? Or, if they wanted to use the M text for the main Greek text, why didn't they use it for the translation as well?

The most consistent thing, I think, would have been to use the TR for both and include M variants to signal points at which the TR readings seemed especially questionable, just as they include NU readings to signal points at which the TR readings are at odds with the reconstructed critical text reflected in the editions of NA and the UBS. Or, if priority really was to be given to the M text, it would have been better to reflect it in the translation, or, the next best thing, keep the TR-based translation but use some simple device within the translation (asterisks or some such thing) to mark the points at it which diverged from the improved M text.

Not a huge issue but an issue nonetheless. Makes me give the book 4 stars where I might otherwise have given it 5.

This book is very nice, having the Greek majority text on the page, with corresponding English translations of every Greek word underneath, and the New King James version is in the margins for comparison. There are also textual notes at the bottoms of the margins as well as notes about how other Greek texts are different in some verses. I give the book 5 stars as a product.

Now let me tell you not to use interlinears. It completely defeats the purpose of working with the Greek text. Hodges and Farstad have made a number of judgment calls in their ultra-literal translation, so you are really just buying their opinions. You might as well just have a translation that you trust in front of you. Interlinears fake you into thinking you are working with the Greek text when you are actually just working with the observations of those who made the interlinear. Do yourself a favor and learn Greek.