Once, in college, I failed to get a perfect score on a Numerical Analysis exam when I carefully and accurately solved a very complicated problem -- which wasn't the problem the professor had set.

That's pretty much what Jay P. Green did with this book. He has started with F. H. A. Scrivener's reconstruction of the Greek text of the King James Bible. He has created an interlinear translation, and a parallel running translation which is sort of King James-ish but with modernization. All this is competently done.

The only problem is in the title. Scrivener's Greek text is not the New Testament. It is the New Testament as badly scrambled in the centuries which passed from the writing of the New Testament to the time of Erasmus, who hurried a Greek edition of the Bible to his printer, further corrupting it along the way, and after that the Greek was further scrambled by later editors.

The scrambling is significant. The best data I've seen is that the Textus Receptus, that is, the Greek text translated in the King James Bible, is about 2% longer than the best modern editions. And the King James Bible isn't even that great a translation of the Textus Receptus!

This is not to deny the literary brilliance of the King James Bible. It is brilliant. But the Greek text is substantially corrupt. If you want to study a New Testament edition that was "precipitated rather than edited" (Erasmus's own words of his edition), then this book is for you. If you want to study the best available New Testament... get an edition based on the United Bible Studies text. ( )

This is good because it has the Greek underlying the KJV, which is different to the Greek of most corporate bibles such as NIV, NKJV, NAB, ESV etc. Gives literal translation of the Greek, and J.P Greem's good translation of the text. He corrects the political correctness of the KJV which forced the translators of the KJV to avoid certain words like, slave, therebye changing the meaning of many passages - this is the only caution I would make for the use of the KJV for theological discussions,- that is some words have been altered to protect the sensibilities of the King (in 1611, also its derivatives including the RSV). With a good Greek lexicon, or J.P. Green's pocket book here, you can avoid misunderstandings. ( )