This book is the product of two people interested in a common task — teaching others about textual criticism, within the context of advancing knowledge of New Testament Greek — working together to achieve that aim. We leave others to decide whether we have accomplished that goal. However, we have enjoyed the process from start to finish, as we have refined this work and developed it according to our goals of providing the fundamentals of textual criticism for those who are interested and serious about learning this important area. As the notes and bibliography make clear, we are very interested in this topic, as well as the Greek language in general, and come to the writing of this book on the basis of having done serious work in textual criticism. We hope that we have learned enough along the way to make the process of learning easier for others.
We realize that the writing of a book like this is never the work of just one or, in this case, two people. We would also like to thank a number of people for their work with us in trying to ensure that we have got our facts straight, and, more importantly, that we have pitched this book at the right level to provide the kind of book that we have envisioned. Thus we would like to thank Will Varner, Karl Armstrong, Bryan Fletcher, and Cliff Kvidahl, who read the entire manuscript and offered thoughtful comments and ideas that made the volume better in many ways. Cliff was especially helpful in working on issues related to the format and images for the volume.
This volume, as its title — Fundamentals of New Testament Textual Criticism — indicates, is designed as part of the series of Greek language resources being published by Eerdmans. Previous volumes in that series include Stanley E. Porter, Jeffrey T. Reed, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Fundamentals of New Testament Greek (2010) and Porter and Reed, Fundamentals of New Testament Greek: Workbook (2010). We are in the process of writing an intermediate grammar that continues to develop this learning curriculum, as well as a book on exegesis and interpretation. We wish to thank Eerdmans for their support of this entire project, including all of its component volumes. To this end, we wish to thank Michael Thomson at Eerdmans, as well as his excellent colleagues there.
Finally, we wish to thank our various supporting institutions for their help in making this work possible. We also wish to thank our wives, Wendy and Amber, for their love and unstinting support. We could not do what we do without them — and it would not be nearly as rewarding or pleasurable.
STANLEY E. PORTER & ANDREW W. PITTS