The Critical Text Changes Again: What the 169 Decisions Are

This is Part 1 of “The Moving Standard: NA29 and the Theology of a Revised Greek New Testament.”

More Than a New Cover

The German Bible Society advertises the forthcoming twenty-ninth Nestle-Aland edition as containing “well over 100” changes from NA28. The exact number now recoverable from the Editio Critica Maior comparison lists is 169: fifty-two in Acts, thirty-three in Mark, and eighty-four in Revelation. These are changes to the adopted main text. They are not merely new manuscript citations in the apparatus, changes of punctuation, or corrected spelling.

The figure needs care. The three ECM volumes also contain 387 split-line locations—places where their editors leave two or more readings open as equally probable—and Revelation records ninety-five further orthographic differences. Those figures must not be added together and described as hundreds of new readings adopted by NA29. The proper claim is narrower and stronger: in 169 locations, the text that NA28 printed or preferred is no longer the text selected for the next edition.

NA29 itself is scheduled for publication on February 28, 2027. Its Greek main text, however, has already appeared in UBS6, and the publisher identifies that text with the one intended for NA29, apart from such matters as punctuation and paragraphing. Until the Nestle-Aland volume can be examined, this series will therefore use the exact expression NA29-basis reading. We are dealing with announced and published Greek readings, but not pretending to have inspected an edition that has not yet appeared.

The Standard of This Audit

The 169 decisions will not be judged by asking which reading is newest, which committee is most learned, or which option presently commands the academy. The governing Greek standard is the received text represented by Scrivener’s edition of the Textus Receptus underlying the Authorized Version. The Authorized Version supplies the faithful English control. Where the NA29-basis text returns to that Greek and English wording, the change will be recognized as a restoration. Where it leaves the received wording, the change will be treated as a departure and its effect stated precisely.

This order matters. A standard does not become a standard by winning the latest editorial vote. Nor does the church discover the authentic text anew whenever a committee replaces one probability judgment with another. The received text is the object against which the moving editions are measured; the moving edition is not the court before which the received text must continually plead for readmission.

That does not relieve us of the duty to describe the critical decision honestly. We will distinguish the NA28 reading, the NA29-basis reading, the received Greek reading, and the Authorized Version. We will also distinguish a changed Greek form from a changed English meaning, a changed English meaning from a changed exegetical claim, and a changed exegetical claim from the loss of a doctrine throughout Scripture. Precision strengthens the case. Calling every particle a doctrinal corruption would make it easier to ignore the passages where a whole clause, title, or theological relation is actually at stake.

What the 169 Contain

The changes fall into four broad classes. The first consists of forms whose effect is chiefly grammatical or stylistic. A case ending changes, an article disappears, a word order shifts, or one spelling replaces another. Such changes still belong in the ledger because they show that NA28 and the new text are not identical. Most do not warrant an article of their own.

The second class changes the wording enough to affect translation or exegesis without removing a full doctrinal proposition. Acts 9:12 omits “in a vision.” Revelation 11:15 changes a masculine participle to a feminine one, identifying the “great voices” grammatically as those that are saying the proclamation. Revelation 12:8 changes a singular verb to a plural, making the dragon and his angels, rather than the dragon alone, the grammatical subject of “prevailed not.” These are real differences, but their weight must not be inflated.

The third class restores readings already present in the received text and the Authorized Version. Mark 1:1 removes NA28’s brackets from “the Son of God” and adopts the received form υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ. Acts 20:21 restores “Jesus Christ.” Revelation 5:9 restores “us,” Revelation 6:17 restores “his wrath,” Revelation 20:9 restores “from God,” and Revelation 22:12 restores the future tense reflected in “as his work shall be.” These decisions are important not because NA29 lends authority to the received text, but because they reveal that the prior critical edition had doubted, shortened, or altered words which the church already possessed.

The fourth class creates a substantial departure. Revelation 18:3 changes the nations from having “drunk” Babylon’s wine to having “fallen.” Revelation 20:5 removes the whole sentence, “But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished.” Revelation 21:6 replaces “It is done. I am Alpha and Omega” with a form most naturally rendered, “I have become, I, the Alpha and the Omega.” These are not typographical refinements. They change what the passage says.

What the Series Will Test

Each article will ask four questions. What did NA28 print? What will the NA29-basis text print? What do the received Greek text and Authorized Version say? What proposition is gained, lost, weakened, restored, or redirected by the change? The last question must be answered at the level of exact entailment. If “in a vision” disappears from Acts 9:12, the doctrine of divine revelation does not vanish from Acts. The verse nevertheless ceases to state expressly that Saul saw Ananias in a vision. If Revelation 20:5 loses its first sentence, the final resurrection does not disappear from the Bible. The passage nevertheless loses its explicit statement that the rest of the dead do not live again until the thousand years are finished. “The doctrine is taught elsewhere” cannot turn those losses into non-events.

The same rule applies when a reading is restored. Mark 1:1 did not cease to teach the deity or divine sonship of Christ merely because NA28 bracketed the words. Yet the later editors have now judged that the opening title belongs in the text without qualification. The correction matters, and it raises a question which cannot be dismissed by pointing to doctrinal stability: if the prior edition was fit to correct the church’s Bible, what authority did its misplaced doubt possess?

The Larger Change Behind the Changes

The German Bible Society calls the new decisions improvements. Some of them are indeed improvements when measured against the received text, for they undo earlier critical departures. Others carry the critical text farther away. But the deeper fact is that the same publishing system presents each successive edition as the current standard while acknowledging that the former standard contained readings now displaced by newer judgments.

A scholarly tool may be revised. A collation may be corrected, an apparatus enlarged, and an editor’s judgment reconsidered. The problem begins when a revisable reconstruction is asked to perform the office of the church’s authentic text. A text that binds faith, preaching, worship, translation, and controversy cannot derive that authority from the date on its title page. If NA28 was the standard, the 169 changes require an account of its errors. If NA29 is now the standard, its announced publication does not explain why its judgments should bind the church. And if neither edition is the standard, then appeals to “the critical text” have concealed the lack of one.

The 169 readings give us something better than a slogan. They permit a controlled experiment. We can watch the critical text move, identify the direction of each movement, and ask what happens when the new edition meets the received Word already confessed, preached, translated, and held fast by the churches.

Notes and Further Reading

• German Bible Society, “The NA 29”, describing the adoption of the ECM changes in Mark, Acts, and Revelation.
• German Bible Society, NA29 product record, giving the February 28, 2027 publication date and stating that the text differs from NA28 at well over one hundred places.
• Institute for New Testament Textual Research, “Online Tools for the ECM”, reporting fifty-two Acts changes and 155 split lines.
• Institute for New Testament Textual Research, “ECM Mark Has Arrived”, reporting thirty-three changes, of which twenty-one agree with the Byzantine text, and 126 split lines.
• Darius Müller, “ECM Revelation: The Details”, reporting eighty-four new initial readings, ninety-five orthographic differences, and 106 split lines.
• Karrer et al., Editio Critica Maior VI.1: Revelation, updated online edition, pp. 47–61.