Is there such a thing as a definitive New Testament? By definitive I mean to say a Greek New Testament that is “most nearly complete and accurate, [and] authoritative.”1 That is to ask, is there a version of the Greek New Testament that serves as the standard to which translations in all languages are compared for accuracy?
Actually, I can answer this question. There is no such thing, in fact, as a definitive New Testament.2 This essay aims to give one small example as to why there is no definitive Greek New Testament. In church services one recent Sunday morning (May 17, 2026), the pastor was expounding on Luke 24:44–53. I was following along using two English translations and the Greek New Testament.3 Suddenly, I found a glaring difference between the two translations. For the beginning of verse 24:52 the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) read the following:
“And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy…”
While the Revised English Bible (REB) read the following:
“And they <…> returned to Jerusalem full of great joy…”
The pointed brackets indicate text missing from the translation and hence the difference between the two translations.
Much to my surprise the words “worshipped him and” were missing in the REB! So the minister must have been reading from the NRSV (or a similar translation) because he made a point of emphasizing their worship of Jesus (literally “bowed the knee to him”) in his remarks on the passage.
So, I turned to see what the Greek text read. The Nestle-Aland 28th edition included the Greek words []proskunēsantes auton\ “worshipped him.” The marks around the Greek words ([]…\) indicate that “the words, clauses, or sentences between the signs are omitted by the witnesses cited.”
The witnesses cited by the Nestle-Aland edition were: Codex Bezae (5th /6th century), Old Latin Manuscripts (4th to the 13th centuries), and the Sinaitic Syriac (4th century).4 Some of these ancient Latin and Syriac versions eliminating the phrase are relatively early. But they are much later than the original autograph (of which there is no copy).
The Bible Society Committee that decided to include the phrase “worshipped him” was sharply divided. A minority of the committee voted not to include “worshipped him” in the text, considering them to be scribal interpolations. The majority, however, considered them to have been either accidentally or deliberately omitted from the text.5 The minority of the committee argued that one can discern “a Christological-theological motivation that accounts for” the words being added to the text but “no clear reason that accounts for their having been omitted.”6
There is a tendency on the part of the scribes of the Western Text (Bezae, Old Latin and Sinaitic Syriac) “to adjust” the text:
Words, clauses, and even whole sentences were changed, omitted, and inserted with astonishing freedom, wherever it seemed that the meaning could be brought out with greater force and definiteness…Another equally important characteristic is a disposition to enrich the text at the cost of its purity by alterations or additions taken from traditional and perhaps from apocryphal or other non-biblical sources.7
Here is some additional information as to how this disagreement between manuscripts is treated in modern translations: Constantine Tischendorf did not include the words “They worshipped him and” in the text but put them in a note.8 The New International Version (NIV) includes them in the text (the NIV is the most popular translation of the Bible by sales in America). An American Translation excludes “worshipped him and” (this is the translation of the New Testament scholar Edgar J. Goodspeed). The New American Bible for Catholics has the words in the text but translates them as “they did him homage.” The Holman Christian Standard Bible includes them in the text translating them as “After worshipping him.” The New American Standard Version does not include the words “worshipping him” in the text and has no note about them. The modern Greek translation of the Greek Orthodox church includes them in the text. Westcott and Hort (text critics of a previous century) preferred the shorter reading in Luke 24:52, regarding the words “worshipped him” as “Western non-interpolations” (in spite of the “generally inferior Western witnesses”).9
What should we conclude from the brief essay? It is: The Bible does not spring immediately from the mouth of God to the printed page of the book on the table beside your bed. It must first pass through the inspired (or not) brains of the original writers and debatable ambiguities of modern textual criticism, as well as the theological biases and peccadillos of modern translators. The New Testament, it turns out, is much less, or perhaps much more than the original autographs.
Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
1M. Agnes, Ed. in Chief, Webster’s New World College Dictionary (4th ed.), under definitive.
2I give my reasons for thinking such to be the case in Hedrick, “The Greek New Testament is a Virtual Text.” Wry Guy Blog, Saturday August 8, 2020: http://blog.charleshedrick.com/2020/08/the-greek-new-testament-is-virtual-text.html.
3The Greek New Testament was the Nestle-Aland 28th edition.
4See Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament. Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (3rd ed.; Oxford: 1992).
5Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed.; United Bible Societies, 1994), 163. See also the “Note on Western Non-Interpolations,” 164–66.
6Metzger, Textual Commentary, 166.
7Metzger, Text of the New Testament, 132—33. Metzger quotes Westcott and Hort.
8Constantinus Tischendorf, Novum Testamentum Graece (2nd ed., 1860).
9Metzger, Textual Commentary, 164–65.