Holy Bible

IIJC Edition

A Bible translated from the source text, with the grounds of every decision published.

What matters about a Greek New Testament is not when it was printed but how old the evidence beneath it is. The SBLGNT rests on papyri of the 2nd to 4th centuries — copies made while the ink of the first century was still close. They survived because Egypt is dry: papyrus rots almost everywhere else. They came to light late — from the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus and, in the twentieth century, in the Chester Beatty and Bodmer collections. Some are scraps the size of a palm; others carry whole gospels.

The Bible most people read descends from editions made before any of that was found. The Greek printed in the sixteenth century rested on a handful of manuscripts from the 11th and 12th centuries — a thousand years of copying away from the papyri. And most Bibles since are revisions of revisions: the wording has travelled through Latin, then through an older version in your own language, and each passage left a mark. Translating straight from the source text means every choice is made once, against the Greek — and can be shown. That is what this edition does: for each unit it publishes the readings weighed, the one adopted, the reason the others were refused, and what does not cross over into your language at all. The base text marks its own uncertainty too: across the four gospels, 2,305 of 3,756 verses carry at least one editorial mark, and we reproduce them.

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