The Patriarchal text, or Patriarchal Text (PT), originally officially published as ''The New Testament, Approved by the Great Church of Christ'' (

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

: Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη ἐγκρίσει τῆς Μεγάλης τοῦ Χριστοῦ Ἐκκλησίας), is an edition of the

New Testament The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...

published by the

Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (, ; ; , "Roman Orthodox Patriarchate, Ecumenical Patriarchate of Istanbul") is one of the fifteen to seventeen autocephalous churches that together compose the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is heade ...

on 22 February 1904. Two revised editions of the PT were later printed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in respectively 1907 and 1912. The PT is also known as the Antoniades-text (after Professor Vasileios Antoniades), or Patriarchal Greek New Testament. The PT is entirely in

Koine Greek Koine Greek (, ), also variously known as Hellenistic Greek, common Attic, the Alexandrian dialect, Biblical Greek, Septuagint Greek or New Testament Greek, was the koiné language, common supra-regional form of Greek language, Greek spoken and ...

. There is no Greek New Testament text accepted by everyone within the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Patriarchal text is no exception. The text-type of the PT is

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman E ...

History

With the growth of

textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may rang ...

in the 18th and 19th century, and particularly the rival eclectic text-type, the Patriarch Constantine V of Constantinople created a committee in 1899 to examine the manuscript tradition of the

Eastern Orthodox Church The Eastern Orthodox Church, officially the Orthodox Catholic Church, and also called the Greek Orthodox Church or simply the Orthodox Church, is List of Christian denominations by number of members, one of the three major doctrinal and ...

. The committee consisted of Metropolitan Michael Kleovoulos of Sardis, Metropolitan Apostolos Christodoulou of Stavroupoli and Professor Vasileios Antoniades of the Theological School of Halki, who personally studied the 45 texts from Mount Athos and Constantinople. The commission aimed for the creation of a standardized New Testament in the Greek Language to reconstruct the ancient documents from the Church's ecclesiastical history. The Patriarchal text was published in 1904. Later revised editions were made in 1907 and 1912, the latter made by Professor Vasileios Antoniades of the Theological School of Halki. Today the Patriarchal text is commonly used in Greece, with a modified text fixing errors from the 1912 version, is published by the Apostoliki Diakonia, which is the official publishing house of the

Church of Greece The Church of Greece (, ), part of the wider Greek Orthodox Church, is one of the autocephalous churches which make up the communion of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Its canonical territory is confined to the borders of Greece prior to th ...

. Other publishers publish the Patriarchal text as well.

Textual characteristics

The text-type of the PT is

and uses 116 documents used in the

lectionaries, 45 of which are from

Mount Athos Mount Athos (; ) is a mountain on the Athos peninsula in northeastern Greece directly on the Aegean Sea. It is an important center of Eastern Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodox monasticism. The mountain and most of the Athos peninsula are governed ...

and

Constantinople Constantinople (#Names of Constantinople, see other names) was a historical city located on the Bosporus that served as the capital of the Roman Empire, Roman, Byzantine Empire, Byzantine, Latin Empire, Latin, and Ottoman Empire, Ottoman empire ...

, with the rest coming from

Athens Athens ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Greece, largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica (region), Attica region and is the southe ...

and

Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...

. The source texts used date from 9-16th centuries, with a majority coming from the 10-14th centuries. The Patriarchal edition of Byzantine text (1904) published in 2020 by the Hellenic Bible Society (Ελληνική Βιβλική Εταιρία) includes the Johannine Comma (1 John 5.7-8).

References

External links

Patriarchal text in original Koine Greek
Eastern Orthodox Church New Testament editions

History

Textual characteristics

See also

References

Further reading

External links