Greek Bible Texts & Tools

Product Guide for Greek Bible Texts & Tools

Logos offers the most comprehensive collection of NT Greek texts and reference works available in electronic form. Most Logos editions of the Greek Bible are morphologically parsed and tagged; Logos Bible Software makes it easy to view this information while you’re reading the text, to search for it, or to jump quickly to an appropriate lexicon.

Many of the texts and language tools discussed in this guide can be found in our heavily discounted base 'library' collections such as:

Greek tools can be divided into the following categories: Bibles, reverse interlinears, critical apparatuses for examining the manuscript evidence used to establish the text of the New Testament, lexicons or dictionaries, grammars (both for learning the language and for advanced reference), technical commentaries that interact heavily with the Greek of the New Testament, and non-biblical books in Greek that are useful for historical and cultural study, or seeing examples of Greek words and phrases used outside the Bible. Logos also offers books on exegetical methods, to help the Bible interpreter use these tools.

Greek Bible Texts

Modern printed editions of the Greek New Testament (as opposed to ancient handwritten manuscripts) can be roughly divided into two categories. On the one hand you have editions based on a relatively small number of the oldest available manuscripts, sometimes known as the ‘Alexandrian’ text family, or the ‘eclectic’ text. On the other hand, you have texts based on a larger number of later manuscripts, sometimes called the ‘Majority’ or ‘Byzantine’ text tradition. Most modern translations of the Bible are based on the Alexandrian text, while the KJV and many other older translations come from the Byzantine text family. Logos offers a wide range of texts in both text families, making it easy to compare traditions.

Alexandrian or Eclectic Texts

Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament with Logos Morphology
Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament with McReynolds English Interlinear with Logos Morphology
Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament Collection (3 vols.)
Nestle-Aland 27th Edition Greek New Testament with GRAMCORD Alpha Morphology
Nestle-Aland 27th Edition Greek New Testament with GRAMCORD Alpha Morphology and McReynolds English Interlinear
UBS 4/Westcott-Hort with Swanson Morphological Analysis
Analytical Greek New Testament (Friberg, Barbara and Timothy) with Nestle Aland 27th ed. 2.0
Westcott and Hort Greek New Testament (1881) With Robinson Morphological Analysis
The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition

All of the texts in the list above have morphological tags to help you identify the grammatical form of each word, along with lexical form tags to help you look words up in the dictionaries.

A fine edition of the NA27 with the critical apparatuses can be found in:

German Bible Society Bundle.
The NA27 with the Critical Appartus is also available as an individual download.

The modern editions based on the Alexandrian text tradition are mostly based on the relatively complete manuscripts Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and Vaticanus, but reference is made to the older fragmentary papyri. Logos offers digital editions of these papyri in the following resource:

The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts

Each of these papyri can function as a ‘Bible’ in Logos, allowing for easy comparison of the oldest Bible fragments against any of the more complete Greek texts in your library.

Byzantine or Majority Texts

Logos offers a number of text in this tradition, most of which also have morphological tags and lexical form tags as well:

The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005 with Morphology
Stephen's Textus Receptus (1550) With Morphology
Scrivener's Textus Receptus (1894) With Morphology
Scrivener's Textus Receptus (1881) 2.0
Elzevir Textus Receptus (1624) with Morphology
The Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament (Newberry; the Stephan's 1550 text with English interlinear glosses)

In addition, the Tischendorf eight edition of the Greek NT is available with a critical apparatus that covers the majority text tradition in greater detail than the NA27 apparatus:

Novum Testamentum Graece Apparatum Criticum

Another edition of the Byzantine text tradition is available with a simple critical apparatus, including comparisons made to the Eclectic Text tradition:

The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, with Apparatus (Hodges and Farstad)

Greek Texts with Syntax and Discourse Analysis Tags

Historically, most Bible software platforms have offered analysis of the Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic bible texts at the word-by-word level. With Logos Bible Software 3, new texts, search interfaces and visualizations are available that systematically analyze the Biblical texts at the syntactic level, or looking at the bigger picture of how words relate together in phrases and clauses and other higher-level structures. Some of the reports, such as the Bible Word Study report, have been designed to make use of stock syntax queries both to help users understand the types of things you can search for with Syntax databases that would be impossible to search for using only morphology, and to provide value right out of the box even for people not trained in linguistics.

The base libraries, such as Scholar's Library, Gold Edition, contain glossaries covering most of the terms used in the above morphological and syntactical databases as well, making it easy to look up the meanings of unfamiliar terminology.

In addition to the syntactical databases listed above, Logos has produced a a database that allows you to search analyze the Greek New Testament at the discourse leve.

Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament Bundle (6 Vols.)

The Septuagint

The Hebrew and Aramaic of the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, and this translation is known as the Septuagint, often abbreviated ‘LXX’. It is well-known that the early church writings, including the New Testament, often cite the Greek version rather than the Hebrew text, making the Septuagint an important document for the study of the New Testament as well as for textual criticism work in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Septuaginta- Morphologically tagged edition, Alfred Rahlfs

Septuaginta- SESB Edition with Appratus and Alternate Texts

Lexham Greek-English Interlinear Septuagint

This is the text of the Septuagint in Greek, with morphological and lexical analysis.

Logos also offers a resource that lines the Greek of the Septuagint up with the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Hebrew Bible, with copious notes on the translation techniques used. Where the Septuagint doesn’t match the Hebrew text, a tentative alternate Hebrew text is also provided as a theoretical reconstruction of what the LXX translators might have been translating from:

The Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Texts of Jewish Scripture by Prof. Emanuel Tov

Reverse Interlinears

Reverse interlinears follow the English text of a particular translation, and provide the Greek text behind the English translation for further study/comparison. This is different from a traditional interlinear, which would place the Greek text on the top line and follow the word order of the Greek text with English glosses placed beneath. Reverse interlinears make it easy to jump back and forth between an English bible and some of the Greek texts listed above, and allow some of the reports in Libronix to report search results in Greek and English in parallel. While not a substitute for working directly with the Greek text, the Logos Bible Software reverse interlinears are far superior to the older tools used by English bible students, such as Strong's numbers (which could only help identify the lexical form of a word), since the reverse interlinears contain complete morphological analysis as well as lexical forms and inflected forms, and can link to the Greek texts and syntax databases for study of the Greek text in its proper word order.

ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear of the New Testament
NRSV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear of the New Testament

Lexicons

The lexical form tags in the texts discussed above can be used to execute a KeyLink to any of the lexicons or dictionaries listed below, enabling you to instantly look up the meaning of Greek words.

The standard New Testament Greek lexicon used by scholars and students today is:

A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature Third Edition (BDAG - Bauer, Danker, Arndt and Gingrich)

This can also be found in a bundle with one of the most important Hebrew lexicons:

BDAG/HALOT Bundle

For examining the use of a NT word in Classical Greek, or for help reading non-canonical texts, you can’t do better than the unabridged Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ):

Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ)

Which is also available in an abridgment:

An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, Liddell & Scott

And for those few, very rare occasions in Koine and Byzantine Greek where both BDAG and LSJ might fail you, you can always turn to E. A. Sophocles' superb Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1100), available in:

E. A. Sophocles Collection (4 Vols.)

Analysis of Greek Papyri documents revolutionized the study of the Greek of the New Testament. One of the most important books to come out of the study of the Papyri is the lexicon by Moulton and Milligan:

The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (Moulton & Milligan)

For studying the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, Logos offers:

A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, Revised Edition (Lust, Eynikel and Hauspie)

For English readers who are unfamiliar with Greek, but want to look up individual words in Greek lexicons, the AMG Bible Essentials CD-Rom contains the Word Study dictionaries, which are much better than things like Strong’s because they provide the English student with much more contextual information, like helping the English reader understand where aspects of Greek grammar effect the meanings of words. Thus the AMG dictionaries are a good stepping stone for English readers to work up towards the more advanced lexicons.

AMG Bible Essentials

Most dictionaries are organized around lexical forms – to use an English example, you would typically look up the word ‘sings’ under the head word ‘sing’. Because we are familiar with the rules of word formation in English, we instinctively know to remove the ‘s’ when looking up this word. However, not all of us have the ability to know the Greek lexical forms when looking at any given Greek word. Most of the Greek Bibles listed above have lexical form tags to help you look words up in the dictionaries, but within LDLS, you will encounter Greek words in commentaries that don’t have lexical form tags. You can use an Analytical Lexicon to look up an inflected form of the word and find out its morphological parsing and the lexical form it is derived from. So having a good analytical lexicon is kind of like having morph tags on every Greek word in your library! The following analytical lexicon is an excellent addition to any library:

Analytical Lexicon of the Greek New Testament (Friberg)

Translators often are very interested in knowing what words are similar in meaning to the word chosen by the author of the text – knowing what words could have been used instead of a particular word can help the translator understand the choices made by the author. The following resources are useful for learning about synonyms:

Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament based on Semantic Domains (Louw-Nida)
Synonyms of the New Testament (Trench)

Often the pastor is looking for more than just information on the meaning of the word, but also wants to know how the word is used to convey theological ideas. Theological dictionaries like the gigantic 10-volume TDNT, the 4-volume EDNT, and the 3-volume Theological Lexicon of the New Testament can be very helpful in this regard. These books contain much information that isn’t found in traditional lexicons.

TDNT can also be found in an abridgement:

The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume

For an important nineteenth century lexicon, and arguably the greatest achievement in nineteenth century Greek lexicography:

Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament

Finally, sometimes you don’t need or want very much information. When you just want a quick gloss, the following books can be very handy:

A Dictionary of Biblical Languages w/ Semantic Domains: Greek (NT)
Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament (Newman, Barclay M., Jr.)
The Greek/Hebrew/Aramaic dictionary in the New American Standard Electronic Bible Library.
Enhanced Strong's Lexicon 2.0

For more information on getting the most out of your lexicons, you may wish to read the articles on KeyLinking on the training articles page – especially the Greek and English articles.

While not exactly a lexicon, a useful guide to help with vocabulary acquisition is also available:

Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary

Grammars

Lexicons are brilliant study tools for working at the word level, but languages communicate on a much higher level than just individual words. To understand a language requires one to learn about grammar and syntax, to know how a language uses words together to convey meaning. The Grammars available in Logos Digital Library System can be divided into two categories: learning grammars, the types of books used in a first-year Greek course, and reference grammars, the intermediate and advanced books that exegetes continue to use even after the initial learning phase.

Beginning Grammars

Kairos: A Beginning Greek Grammar & Workbook
Learning the Basics of New Testament Greek w/ Workbook
Swetnam's An Introduction to the Study of New Testament Greek Volumes 1 & 2 (in the Introduction to Biblical Greek collection)
Vine's You Can Learn New Testament Greek!
Nunn's Syntax, Elements, and Key to the Elements of New Testament Greek
Introduction to NT Greek (CDROM)
Beginner's Grammar of the Greek New Testament: Revised and Expanded
Essentials for New Testament Greek Studies
Learn to Read New Testament Greek

Logos also provides an add-in to help anyone learn to pronounce Greek:

Greek Pronunciation Addin with Erasmian & Modern Data Sets

While not a grammar, there is an interesting daily devotional available to help students of Greek and Hebrew keep up with their hard-earned skills after leaving the classroom:

More Light on the Path: Daily Scripture Readings in Hebrew and Greek

Reference Grammars

The first four listed are all standards in the world of New Testament Study, and are commonly cited in the lexicons and commentaries. The last is a quick overview of Greek morphology and syntax designed originally to be slipped inside the cover of a printed Greek New Testament.

A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDF - Blass, Debrunner and Funk)
Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (Robertson)
Syntax of the Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek (Burton)
Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Wallace)
Idioms of the Greek New Testament, Second Edition (Porter)
Zerwick's Biblical Greek Illustrated By Examples (in the Introduction to Biblical Greek collection)
Grammar of New Testament Greek (4 volumes by Moulton, Howard and Turner)
Chapman's New Testament-Greek Notebook
Greek New Testament Insert, Chapman-Shogren
Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach
Studies in New Testament Greek and JSNTS Colelction (17 volumes - gathering interest on the pre-publication offer. Contains many monographs on the application of modern linguistics to the study of New Testament Greek, including many essays on Verbal Aspect and Discourse Analysis.)

Grammars use their own technical terminology, and the labels can change from grammar to grammar. IVP has published a LDLS edition of their Pocket Dictionary for the Study of New Testament Greek, which functions as a handy guide to looking up hundreds of terms used by various grammarians and linguists when discussing New Testament Greek. This dictionary can be found along with a number of other reference works in:

The Essential IVP Reference Collection, Version 2

Critical Apparatuses

There are over 5000 handwritten manuscripts covering portions of the Greek New Testament. These manuscripts often vary from each other. Most of these variants are small – minor differences in spelling or word order, but some are significant. One of the main tools that text critics use to examine the evidence for the different readings is called a critical apparatus. These tell what manuscripts support what variant readings.

The most important critical apparatus for the study of the Greek NT is the NA27 apparatus found in the SESB collection.

Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible (SESB) Version 2.0

The apparatus itself is quite terse, and many readers find Metzger’s Textual Commentary to be the perfect companion volume because it explains the important variants in an easier to read fashion:

A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament - Metzger

The NA27 apparatus only lists those variants that were deemed most significant, and tends to lump all the Majority text manuscripts together – this was done to save space, since these notes were originally printed at the bottom of the printed page of the NA27 Greek text. The older Tishendorf apparatus was developed before the discovery of many of the earliest papyri, but it is much more exhaustive in its treatment of the Majority text tradition, and so is a useful companion to the SESB apparatus and the Metzger commentary:

Novum Testamentum Graece Apparatum Criticum (Tischendorf)

A simpler apparatus that also takes the Majority text as its base, and compared the Majority text with the Alexandrian text can be found in:

The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, with Apparatus (Hodges and Farstad)

While the critical apparatus to the NA27 will list important readings from the papyri - the earliest of the New Testament manuscripts, text critics will appreciate the ability to read complete transcriptions of these manuscripts, available in:

The Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts

Text Critics also examine the early translations of the New Testament for their witness to the text. Logos offers early translations of the New Testament in Syriac and Latin.

The Peshitta New Testament (Syriac)
Old Syrian Gospels: Codex Curetonianus
Old Syrian Gospels: Codex Sinaiticus
The Vulgate (Latin)
Sahidic Coptic Collection - under development

And lexicons for the above texts:

Several books discuss the methods of text criticism:

A Student's Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible
The Making of the New Testament
New Testament Textual Criticism Collection (6 vols.) - under development

Technical Commentaries

Some commentaries on the Bible text interact with the Greek text and the grammars and the lexicons in great detail, making them useful companions for the study of the biblical languages.

There are three sets of 'word studies' books that have achieved a sort of classical status in New Testament studies. These books are organized like commentaries, stepping though the New Testament verse by verse, but most of the comments are centered on the Greek words. While some of the information in these sets is considered dated, and should be supplemented with newer reference works, these sets have been among the most commonly used references for sermon preparation for the past few generations of pastors.

Word Pictures in the New Testament (A.T. Robertson, 6 volumes)
Word Studies in the New Testament (M.R. Vincent, 4 volumes)
Word Studies in the Greek New Testament (Wuest - originally 14 volumes, often reprinted in 4.)

There are also a number of reading aids to help intermediate students work through reading the text of the Greek New Testament. Like the above books, they are organized by bible verse, but are centered around providing just enough grammatical and lexical aid to help the reader, and are not designed to be commentaries, per se. One of the most popular of these 'readers' is:

A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament (Zerwick-Grosvenor)

Non-Canonical Texts

Greek lexicons like BDAG often cite the non-biblical Greek for more evidence on how a given word is used. This is especially important with words that only occur once or twice in the New Testament. These texts are also often of interest for historical and theological study, in addition to their usefulness in lexical studies. Many of the most important Greek texts for comparative study are available in LDLS:

Also in this category could go a discussion of the Hellenistic Greek papyri found in Egypt that has shed so much light on the everyday Greek spoken during New Testament times.