The Solid Rock Greek New Testament offers a critical text that gives a greater priority to Byzantine textual tradition. The editors, Joey McCollum and Stephen L. Brown argue that other contemporary editions of the Greek New Testament place too much weight on scribes deliberately making changes and perceived corrections to the text. They instead propose that an edition that gives more weight the principle of scribal inertia in making textual decisions would fill an much needed lacuna. As such, the base text for their analysis is the Robinson-Pierpont text, with divergences cataloged and explained in an appendix.
This edition is not, technically speaking, a new critical text. The sources used for the production of the text and apparatus are modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament instead of ancient manuscripts. The apparatus itself presents a collation of these editions relative to the printed text in the main body. The central goal is to provide a useful tool for students and pastors who desire an accessible, but comprehensive guide to those places where New Testament textual critics have offered competing opinions about the original text. As the editors express it in their introduction: “Exegesis begins with the text; therefore, a solid foundation for making decisions on variants in the text is indispensable.”